Gardeners must stop using peat

I USED to live in “God’s own country” and that can only be one place, as every true Yorkshirewoman will tell you.

Our Sundays were spent striding the beautiful wild expanses of the moors surrounding our home in Ilkley. It wasn’t hard to see how Emily Brontë conjured up the enigmatic Heathcliff in such an empty and desolate landscape.

The Yorkshire moors are a special landscape in other ways, though. They are home to more than a quarter of England’s blanket bog.

Blanket bog forms in upland areas where the soil is poorly drained and the saturated, acidic conditions favour bog-mosses and cotton grasses which do not fully decompose when they die but slowly accumulate as peat.

This means that the normal process of respiration when decomposing plants release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere doesn’t happen and the carbon is trapped in the peat.

Yorkshire’s peat bogs currently store an astonishing 38m tonnes of carbon and globally peatlands are the largest terrestrial store of carbon — twice that of forests. Peat bogs are our own Amazon rainforest.

Once peat bogs become degraded, for example by industrial peat extraction for sale to gardeners, the peat is exposed to the air and begins to oxidise, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Eighty-seven per cent of England’s peatlands are degraded, damaged or dried out.

The Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust has estimated that annual UK peat sales would fill 29,000 large shipping containers and release up to 850,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s the equivalent to driving an average petrol car 2.2 billion miles.

It is even more depressing, therefore, that while the Government recognises the importance of peat bogs in reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and protecting their unique flora and fauna, progress towards protecting them has been slow with targets often missed.

In 1999 the Government published the Biodiversity Action Plan which stated that by 2010 UK horticulture would be 90 per cent peat-free.

In fact use increased, necessitating a new target for phasing out peat use altogether by 2020 which then slipped to 2024 and now looks likely to slip again.

More encouragingly, in August the Government announced £16million worth of funding to projects to restore peatlands in England.

That’s welcome news but what can individuals do to help? It’s simple — use a peat-free compost for your plants. Peat-free composts are freely available, effective and competitively priced.

The Royal Horticultural Society has a handy guide to peat-free composts with particular advice on which composts work best with different plants (www.rhs.org.uk/soil-composts-mulches/peat-free).

Trials by consumer advice group Which? found that peat-free composts are as good as peat.

Not being very green-fingered myself, I asked some local gardeners in the know.

Staff at the Toad Hall garden centre, which sells a wide range of peat-free composts, said that it would be peat-free by next year but is continuing to offer a choice for the time being. However, many of its customers are already choosing peat-free composts.

Lex Volkes, conservation officer at Henley Town Council, confirmed that the council chooses peat-free options whenever it can.

But don’t take it from us. Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don says: “Peat bogs are a unique habitat and ecosystem that establishes very slowly, so it is important to ensure it is uninterrupted.

“Peat can take a year to increase by just one millimetre. Vast extraction machinery can remove metres of peat at a time, destroying thousands of years of habitat in seconds. No garden is worth that.”