Time to say goodbye to peat

Apparently, Easter weekend is the busiest of the year in garden centres across the land. Given the generally mild and dry spring most of us have been enjoying, Easter 2017 could turn out to be even busier than ever.

Along with all the ready-to-plant plants flying off the shelves, there will also be tonne after tonne of compost and grow-bags humped into car boots ready to fill several million pots and seed trays.

I’m sure all of you are aware of the long-running campaign we have waged against the mass extraction of peat for the horticulture industry, and the harm it is doing to rare and threatened wildlife in the peat bogs. I’m sure, too, that you’re aware how long it takes for peat to grow – about one metre every thousand years (one millimetre a year)! Here's one of the nation's best preserved lowland peat bog, called Cors Caron National Nature Reserve in Mid Wales, which I was fortunate to visit last year. It was glorious!

But how easy is it in 2017 to buy peat-free compost. Well, I visited a garden centre last week to check.

The two peat-free composts (a multi purpose and a growbag) were clearly labelled. Great! And they were no more expensive than other types.

But the problem is that all the other composts (about 12 in total) took detective work worthy of Hercule Poirot to work out if they had peat or not! A couple called themselves ‘peat reduced’, but you had to find a little box on the back of the bag to find that they contained ‘40-70% peat’. Other bags didn’t even explicitly say that they contained peat, except some very small text (on the back, again) saying “Our peat is sustainably extracted”, whatever that means. Who knows how much peat they contained!

Thank you if you took part in the RSPB/National Trust/Friends of the Earth survey last month, which found that my experience is not a one-off: the majority of composts out there are not clearly labelled at all.

It means that 1.5 million cubic metres of peat are still sold in UK garden outlets. That's every year. That's enough to fill St Paul's Cathedral, floor to ceiling, ten times over, including the dome.

So while the RSPB and partners must keep up the pressure on the major outlets to better label their products, we gardeners must continue to do what we can to seek out peat-free composts, get used to using them, and spread the word.

It’s not as if they don’t work. I’ve been peat-free for over 20 years now, and I think they are getting better and better. I still sieve it to make seed compost, and mix it with some perlite or vermiculite (below). But I'd happily use any of the major brand peat-free composts these days.

And for simple potting on, they usually don't need any preparation at all, with great results.

So, this Easter, why not pledge to either go peat-free yourself if you haven’t made the shift, or share your tips for using peat-free compost with friends and family to help others make the change. A host of rare dragonflies, birds and other wildlife is counting on it.