can someone give me a quick rundown on why peat isnt environmentally friendly? is it a wildlife environment issue?

The short and sweet answer is that peat bogs are an important and fairly rare habitat that are essential to a range of wildlife and their extent and existence is threatened by peat extraction for horticulture. Peat bogs are also important to our climate for two reasons: they are significant stores of carbon and damage to bogs caused by extraction releases this carbon, accelerating global warming; secondly peat bogs can form over thousands of years and provide a record of the climate in the past help us to understand climate change and it's potential impacts on ecosystems.

Hope this helps, let me know if yo want me to dig out a few links for you.

net what an informative reply you are very knowledgable

thats cool bruv, yeh lets all boycott peat!! i remember some years back they found the remains of a Saxon dude in a peat bog.. preserved very well if i remember right, they even knew what his last meal was etc...

thanks for taking the time mate to explain

Add to that the massive carbon footprint of all those diggers etc, plus the transport and the fuel consumed to sterilise and treat everything and so on - and you're a long way from being truly organic IMO.

Takes about a million years to create and about 5 minutes to excavate.

When I was a bairn I always used to get packed off in Summer Holidays up to my grandparents Croft in Caithness,the major source of fuel come winter was peat cut from the crofts hags,everyone cut peat in the surrounding areas and if memory serves all the crofts had peat-cutting rights?

There is of course Moorland Gold which is peat but doesn't damage the environment when being extracted, so you can have organic peat

Is coir any better than peat in this regard? I don't know where companies that make coir based compost get their coir from, but I reckon they're not growing them in Europe, seing as coconut trees grow in tropical climates. They still need to be transported to our side of the planet, so even if the actual sourcing of coconuts is more environmenally friendly than stripping peat bogs, the transport and processing is like any other export product.

Point being: Growing truly organic is not a viable option for most people, if not all of us. Using local sources when possible is of course all for the better, but finding replacments for peat-based composts as a growing medium can be quite hard, depending on where you're situated at. And there's no guarantee that the replacments will be much better regarding footprint. If the choice comes down to using peat-based compost or nothing I reckon 10 out of 10 growers would choose the peat. And that's how it goes. I reckon until the coir-based composts and other alteratives are as available and as good (if not better) as peat-based composts, we're going to be using peat for a quite a while still. It's good to see that there's people out there providing organic peat as well, as per Felix's tip on Moorland Gold / Nature's own compost

Fertile Fibres coir compost is fully certified by the SA as being organic . You can download their certificate for your own perusal from here

Peat is often used in this way but the impacts of locally managed use for local fuel needs is different in magnitude from the impacts of commercial extraction.




I think it's easy to overstate the carbon impacts of shipping a product like coir that is light weight and compactable, for example it is much better to buy veg has been shipped across the world than veg that has been grown locally out of season in a heated glasshouse. I certainly believe that coco coir is a much preferable product environmentally than peat mined from bogs because of the hefty ecological toll, although I haven't seen a life cycle comparison. Coir production can also bring money and aid local development and employment opportunities in Sri Lanka and parts of India.

Coir is waste product from coconuts,it would otherwise be stripped from the husk and dumped to rot I hope all you "Carbon-footprinters" dont jet off on expensive foreign holidays Use mobile-phones or run a car,otherwise ethics is a place just east of London for someone with a speech impediment.

To be honest, I think the Carbon footprint of obtaining growing media pales into insignificance compared to that produced by the HID lighting..

I am going to lose sleep over my box of peat-pellets and try and assuage my guilt by walking to my next holiday destination(its only 7500 miles)scrapping the car as every time I stick the key in the ignition I would have nightmares and cold sweats,and trying to milk the kids hamsters as the plastic container my normal milk comes in isnt organic,is it

The location of most peat bogs were under glacial ice or were frozen tundra up until 12-14,000 years ago so peat is a post glacial deposit.

Peat extraction locally destroys the flora and fauna leaving a barren wasteland for many years and the exposed peat produces slightly more CO2 than untouched peat bog. With peat bogs covering ~1/50th of the planets land mass, they are massive short-medium term carbon depositories. Concidered though in the wider timescale, boglands are anaerobic environments, so the lack of oxygen means that the 25x more effective greenhouse gas Methane is produced instead of CO2 during the in situ decomposition of the peat. This methane production balanced against the possible CO2 release from free oxidation of the original material means that it could be argued that peat bogs are a negative not a positive force in global warming through geological history. In addition peat bogs stifle erosion and the flow of sediment to the sea which reduces the amount of Ca and Mg that reaches the ocean which in turn impacts on the creation potential for calcareous organisms which are the ultimate long term CO2 store. If the current warming trend continues though the massive peat store in the arctic Tundra with its trapped methane and newly discovered ability to produce nitrous oxide is going to be a lot bigger problem than peat bogs!

Interesting - For use straight out of the bag -Tomato compost or their Potting + Container Compost for Canna do you reckon? What else are in them apart from the filtered peat?

Thing is, though, it doesn't have to a matter of choosing either extreme of the scale, i.e. don't-give-a-shit vs. living-as-a-hunter-gatherer. I find that whole polarization ridicolous. Most things aren't black and white, but shades of grey. So if using coir instead of peat helps, than it's all good, isn't it? Each and every person leaves a footprint just by existing on this planet (nothing new there), but I see nothing wrong with trying to minimize it when you can (espically us westerners) and without a ridicolous amount of effort (avoiding leather shoes, transportation etc and such extremes.).

Coir seems to much more common in the UK than in Scandinavia. I asked a fellow at at garden center and he didn't have a clue what I was on about and showed me a hanging basket made of weaved coco fibre. I 'ed, and then I walked away shaking my head. If people up here want to use coco, they have to use products from growshops (like Canna and Plagron), as it's the only coco-products available. It's nice to see that there's certified organinc coir products, though. Interesing infor from billious as well. It seems that we're basically fooked either way, eh?

I lived for a year on a desert island a'la'Robinson Crusoe No electricity,no water on tap,fished,grew what we needed,so those who want to preach about "Carbon footprints" try it sometime then get back to me No TV,no Microwave,no PC,we had nowt,zip,zilch,lit the house with lamp-oil made from Copra,I made a whole lot smaller footprint than those preaching to me

ok, so peat may be unethical, for all the reasons already given, but surely its still organic? isn't organic a description of the chemistry, i.e. based on organic carbon chemistry, with no chemical additives, rather than a label put on something which is ethically produced?

'Organic' in agriculture/food production has a different meaning from organic in chemistry.

hxxp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/organic includes 15 different definitions. Two of them are:



and



The labelling of organic foods products in the UK is governed by the Soil Association, and is probably what most peeps are thinking of when talking about organicly grown weed.

There definition is (my emphasis):



I hope that helps. The problem with mined peat is that extraction directly destroys the environment and wildlife in a distinctly unsustainable way and therefore mediums containing mined peat can never be labelled as suitable for organic gardening.