A vocal minority in my local gardening society think preventing gardeners using peat is outrageous. Is it?
Email lucy.siegle@observer.co.uk with your ethical dilemma
Peat bogs are prodigiously talented. Globally they store twice the carbon locked in forests. It's estimated that the atmospheric carbon stored in peat bogs over the past 10,000 years has reduced global temperatures by 1.5-2C. Globally, 10% of available freshwater is held in them. New research from Exmoor suggests that in recent weeks they've helped reduce flooding.
They are our rainforest. Imagine the outcry if gardeners – even celebrity ones – decided they needed to slash and burn a few hectares in the Amazon biome in order to better grow their azaleas. Yet some are irked by the fact that by next year peat should have been phased out of public parks, by 2020 from your own garden and by 2030 from commercial plant growing.
British UK gardeners are still using enough peat to fill around 40m 70-litre compost bags every year. Limited commercial extraction of UK peat continues, but 62% of the stuff we use for gardening comes from elsewhere: namely Ireland and northern Europe.
As a carbon sink, peatland is global common land. The flip side of peat's ability to hold carbon is that extraction releases the carbon reserves. There's no need to use peat as a soil improver when mundane mulches can easily be made from green waste. Some say they are dependent on peat composts (multipurpose compost typically contains 70-100% peat), with their brilliant reputation for consistency.
Recently Dutch academics claimed that "peat is an indispensable raw material" in horticulture, and the Dutch agricultural industry brought out certification for responsibly produced peat. I don't buy this. We've only really used peat as a growing medium since the 1970s and we could question its fabled consistency, as there are many variations.
Watch out for the promotion of peat as "sustainable". Yes, technically it does regrow (unlike other extracted materials, such as gold or iron ore), but it takes millennia to form a 2m layer that can be wiped out in minutes by mechanised commercial extraction. Peatlands don't work along the timescale that humans can get to grips with and certainly don't fit in with the gardening calendar – unlike applications for the £50,000 grant Britain in Bloom is offering to community projects planting peat free, open until May. Perhaps one for your gardening society?
*Green crush*
Don't fear the reaper. Chris Riley, 55, teaches traditional skills and has, singlehandedly, traditionally harvested the first crop of water reed on the River Exe for a quarter of a century. It took him a week of back-breaking work to harvest an acre – and you may ask why. "Water reed is an untapped resource because of its inaccessibility and the manual labour involved in cutting it," he explains. The reed will eventually be used as roof thatch for Link House, an eco building in the South Hams. The scythe blade produces a clean, straight cut through the reed stem (a spinning motorised blade would weaken the reed). "It's efficient in work, poetic in motion and a metaphor for sustainability," says Riley.
*Greenspeak: super-slow steaming {sju:p-slv-'sti:mıŋ} noun*
In an effort to combat hulking fuel bills, the international shipping industry is on an eco drive. The ubiquitous go-slow sees most lines dropping operating speeds below 15 knots
If you have an ethical dilemma, email Lucy at lucy.siegle@observer.co.uk Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
Email lucy.siegle@observer.co.uk with your ethical dilemma
Peat bogs are prodigiously talented. Globally they store twice the carbon locked in forests. It's estimated that the atmospheric carbon stored in peat bogs over the past 10,000 years has reduced global temperatures by 1.5-2C. Globally, 10% of available freshwater is held in them. New research from Exmoor suggests that in recent weeks they've helped reduce flooding.
They are our rainforest. Imagine the outcry if gardeners – even celebrity ones – decided they needed to slash and burn a few hectares in the Amazon biome in order to better grow their azaleas. Yet some are irked by the fact that by next year peat should have been phased out of public parks, by 2020 from your own garden and by 2030 from commercial plant growing.
British UK gardeners are still using enough peat to fill around 40m 70-litre compost bags every year. Limited commercial extraction of UK peat continues, but 62% of the stuff we use for gardening comes from elsewhere: namely Ireland and northern Europe.
As a carbon sink, peatland is global common land. The flip side of peat's ability to hold carbon is that extraction releases the carbon reserves. There's no need to use peat as a soil improver when mundane mulches can easily be made from green waste. Some say they are dependent on peat composts (multipurpose compost typically contains 70-100% peat), with their brilliant reputation for consistency.
Recently Dutch academics claimed that "peat is an indispensable raw material" in horticulture, and the Dutch agricultural industry brought out certification for responsibly produced peat. I don't buy this. We've only really used peat as a growing medium since the 1970s and we could question its fabled consistency, as there are many variations.
Watch out for the promotion of peat as "sustainable". Yes, technically it does regrow (unlike other extracted materials, such as gold or iron ore), but it takes millennia to form a 2m layer that can be wiped out in minutes by mechanised commercial extraction. Peatlands don't work along the timescale that humans can get to grips with and certainly don't fit in with the gardening calendar – unlike applications for the £50,000 grant Britain in Bloom is offering to community projects planting peat free, open until May. Perhaps one for your gardening society?
*Green crush*
Don't fear the reaper. Chris Riley, 55, teaches traditional skills and has, singlehandedly, traditionally harvested the first crop of water reed on the River Exe for a quarter of a century. It took him a week of back-breaking work to harvest an acre – and you may ask why. "Water reed is an untapped resource because of its inaccessibility and the manual labour involved in cutting it," he explains. The reed will eventually be used as roof thatch for Link House, an eco building in the South Hams. The scythe blade produces a clean, straight cut through the reed stem (a spinning motorised blade would weaken the reed). "It's efficient in work, poetic in motion and a metaphor for sustainability," says Riley.
*Greenspeak: super-slow steaming {sju:p-slv-'sti:mıŋ} noun*
In an effort to combat hulking fuel bills, the international shipping industry is on an eco drive. The ubiquitous go-slow sees most lines dropping operating speeds below 15 knots
If you have an ethical dilemma, email Lucy at lucy.siegle@observer.co.uk Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.