Why I don’t use Peat Moss

 

Walking on the Yorkshire Moors. Credit Daniel Wildey Photography/North York Moors National Park

When I was a new gardener at Twin Oaks Community in central Virginia, I was a bit surprised to find the crew using peat moss in the potting mix. I come from the UK, where gardeners’ use of peat has long been challenged as unsustainable and ecologically destructive. I lived in Yorkshire and frequently took walks up on the “tops” (moors). I admit it did take me a while to come to appreciate the treeless stark beauty there. The moors are wild, wet and windy. You get wide views (if the mist or rain is not too thick). You get space and isolation, and tons of very fresh air. There are ancient trackways where salt and coffins were carried, and standing stones, and abandoned industrial workings such as millstone carving sites and mines. If you go alone, you need good navigation skills in the less-traveled parts. If you are unwary, you can find yourself thigh-deep in a bog, and the water is never warm.

Cutting peat turfs for heating. Photo Wikimedia Commons

In previous times, various efforts were made to drain the water and make the land arable or forested. Meanwhile, local people (or at least the “hearth-holders,” and I feel sorry for the others) had Rights of Turbary, meaning that each summer they could cut out slices of peat (turfs or turves) from the section of common or private land they had rights to, dry them and haul them home as winter fuel. More recently, interest rose in preserving the unique moorland ecosystems. The rich had their pheasant shoots, and they still do. The gamekeepers conducted controlled burns of the heather and bracken to make sure the plants grew tender new shoots at the time of year the young pheasants needed them. Sheep had some access. People enjoyed the birdlife, the heather flowers, the carnivorous sundew plants, the cottongrass, the mosses and other bog plants.

Roundleaf sundew, a carnivorous plant. Photo iNaturalist

There are many types of peat moss, including 160 species of sphagnum moss. It grows slowly, and needs acidic water and cool-to-cold temperatures. It could be a renewable resource in places with very large amounts of untouched peat bogs, like Canada. That is, if we only harvest small amounts. But, oil and coal could theoretically be renewable if we wait long enough! The Canadian horticulture industry does have some guidelines and best management practices and a certification program for Responsibly Managed Peatlands. You can read about them in Jennifer Zurko’s article I describe later. There are some restoration projects, including the Moss Layer Transfer Technique, a kind of grafting or transplant process. The suppliers do have some “enlightened self-interest” in preserving their goose that lays the golden eggs. In 2021 in the UK, a phased-in ban on peat-based growing media will reach a complete ban in 2024. The rate of progress with phasing out sales was seriously set back when lots of new gardeners wanted peat during the Covid pandemic! Most retailers did not start phasing it out! The UK supply of peat is much smaller than in Canada, and the situation there is critical.

Relatively recently, many people have realized the enormous value of peat bogs as a big carbon sink. Keeping carbon in the ground is one way to strive to reduce the impact of climate change. The wet, anaerobic conditions hold the carbon in the dead plant matter. If we burn it, obviously the carbon is released. This is also true if we use peat in our gardens, mixing it with other ingredients and exposing it to the air. Peat is not coal, it’s not yet a fossil fuel, but it’s on its way. If you use peat, you may have noticed the old heather twigs, and leafy and mossy bits.

In a small country like the UK, it’s more obvious that the rate of use of peat exceeds the rate at which it is laid down. The UK is committed to limit or to completely stop peat use in the home garden market in 2024, and in the professional market by 2030. In the US, we import most of our peat moss from Canada, a large country with a relatively small population clustered close to the US border. Who sees the peat bogs? But the environmental impact is the same. Using peat moss contributes to global heating.

Screening compost for seed compost and potting compost.
Photo Wren Vile

We reduced our use of peat moss at Twin Oaks by first discovering that our homemade compost could be screened (sieved) and used alone for potting transplants and sowing seeds in flats. Our remaining use of peat was for soil blocks. Soil blocks are cubes of potting media that can stand alone and grow seedlings. No plastic pots! To work in a soil blocker, the mixture must be quite wet and sticky. We experimented to find a recipe with as much homemade compost and as little peat moss as possible.

Lettuce transplants in soil blocks.
Photo Pam Dawling

Next, we switched to replacing the peat with coir, the fibrous stuff from coconut shells. It is sold in compressed bricks that need soaking in water and crumbling before use. The material has been shredded, and is easy to use. This is a by-product of growing coconuts. No coconuts are harvested just for the coir. It seems like a freebie, a “waste” product. Maybe our purchase helps people in poorer countries to get more money for their agricultural efforts. Of course, getting the coir from the tropical coconut-growing regions does involve some shipping. It’s shelf-stable, so can come by ship, using less fuel than air transportation. However, maybe the coconut groves would benefit from the coir being returned to the soil below the coconut palms. There are no “wastes” in agriculture.

Soil Blocker (currently on sale) at Johnny’s Selected Seeds

We still use coir for soil blocks, but we reduced our use of soil blocks, and last year made none at all. Now we use Winstrip trays instead of soil blocks. These are heavy-duty plastic with many years (decades?) of use ahead. They have square cells with vertical slits in the sidewalls and a staggered arrangement allowing air to prune the roots of the seedlings, one of the values of soil blocks. With Winstrip trays, we can use 100% home-made compost, not bought-in imports at all. Filling the Winstrips is very quick, much quicker than getting a good block mix and ejecting each set of four soil blocks.

Transplanting from Winstrips is almost as easy as transplanting soil blocks. With soil blocks, you open a hole in the soil (I used to like a right-angled trowel for this job; Eliot Coleman advocates a cut-off bricklaying trowel). Drop the block in the hole and firm the soil back in place. With Winstrips, you poke the plug up through the hole in the bottom, then lift it out, and it’s just like planting a soil block.

Okra seedlings in a Winstrip tray in the greenhouse.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Margaret Roach addressed this issue with Brian Jackson, an expert in soil-less growing media on her website A Way to Garden: Can we Replace Peat Moss? You can read the interview or listen to the podcast.

The January 2022 issue of GrowerTalks magazine has an article from an industry perspective: Is Peat Sustainable by Jennifer Zurko. There is an archived version of an earlier webinar, linked from the article, if you prefer that format.

Suppliers of other potting media are selling ground composted bark and rice hulls. The same questions remain. In the case of rice hulls, the additional question is, do we want to aid and abet the eating of hulled white rice? And another is whether the potting mix has any nutrients for the growing plants. If you can make and use your own compost, you can be confident your plants will get nutrients. Commercial potting mixes have nutrients added. Making a change will involve assessing your options and the results you get. Using a different medium will require other changes, like how much you need to water. It will involve paying more attention than you needed for doing the familiar.

So, we are back to using (very durable) plastics and no longer buy any peat moss. Probably we won’t buy coir again either, once we have used what we have in stock. This is one of those agricultural dilemmas everyone gets to find their own solution to. Peat bogs can perhaps be restored eventually, but we need to then leave them be, and leave peat in the ground, as with coal and oil.

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food and Love, by Kristin Kimball, Scribner, 2010 – Book Review

The Dirty LifeI feel drawn to autobiographies of women farmers, and Kristin Kimball’s story of growing food for a hundred people particularly appealed to me. I grow vegetables and some fruit for a hundred people at Twin Oaks Community, and our farming as a whole provides meat and dairy products too – what would be the points of similarity and of difference?

Kristin is a freelance writer from New York City. She interviews an energetic young farmer, gets pulled into joining in his work, and then moves from the city to start a new life with him. After some time looking for suitable land for free, they find the deeply run down Essex Farm. This book is the story of their first tumultuous year at Essex Farm (2003), operating a Full Diet CSA.

For farmers, this book will not be a cozy read – you’ll be on the edge of your chair! I probably got over half way through the book before I had any hope that they could succeed. Kristin and Mark’s success defies the quantity of hard work, the number of disasters and arguments, and their opposing strongly held opinions. And yet I know they succeeded, because several years have elapsed since the book was written and they are speaking at the Virginia Biological Farming Conference in February 2013. But my goodness, in the early days, they seemed doomed to fail.

Their Whole Diet CSA model is revolutionary not only in the range of food provided, but also in the radical distribution method, which is simplicity itself: “Take what you need.” They provide vegetables, fruit, herbs, maple syrup, flours, dried beans, eggs, milk, beef, chicken and pork, for $2900 (in 2010), on a sliding scale. The members can show up every Friday afternoon to collect what they need from what’s available. Some members live pretty much on the food from Essex Farm, and others also buy elsewhere. There were about 100 members in 2010.

Kristin starts from being a very soft-handed non-farming townie in tight jeans and heeled boots. She has a lot to learn! How will it ever work? Especially as Mark is experienced at farming and seemingly obsessed with working long hard hours in top gear. We don’t hear so much from Mark’s perspective, but Kristin does tell us that he avoids the word “work”, preferring to say “I farmed for 14 hours today.” I like that approach. Mark is an excellent cook as well as a very good farmer. Early in their relationship he kills a deer and cooks dinner. Kristin says “I fell in love with him over a deer’s liver.”

Mark has all the farming knowledge and plenty of opinions besides. He believes he has a magic circle around him, and that good things (such as a free farm) will manifest. Naturally enough, this is exasperating for Kristin, who is accused of draining the magic with her negativity. The clash of the earnest woo-woo hippie and the middle-class lover of manicures and foreign travel doesn’t look promising. Mark tells Kristin to give away her beautiful bed rather than bring it with her to the farm, as he will build a more beautiful bed. They sleep on a mattress on the floor for a very long time. How is this all going to lead to a thriving farm and two thriving farmers?

They (led by Mark) decide to farm in ways they enjoy even if they are less efficient: working horses, hand-milking, no fussing over picayune pricing of individual products. They move to Essex farm in early winter. There are tenants in the farmhouse, so they rent a place in town and commute to milk their cow, feed their chickens and restore the outbuildings. Meanwhile they make plans. Their plans are way beyond reasonable. In one week in February they intend to plan and build a greenhouse. The next week they will cut and split the whole year’s supply of firewood. They planned to hold their wedding in October, coinciding with 50 chicks arriving. Their honeymoon week they would also be extracting honey!

Kristin Kimball
Kristin Kimball

Kristin gets library books about construction and plumbing. She realizes how wrong her prejudice was, that manual workers are stupid and lazy. She gets herself through this big change in lifestyle by pretending she’s visiting a foreign land and will one day go home. She enjoys the present, the everyday, but doesn’t consider the hard work in the dirt and cold as a long-term lifestyle. She doesn’t want the emergencies – runaway cattle, freezing pipes, work at all hours, endlessly.

Despite the ill omens, they survive the winter (and we’re talking a long Northern winter here). “March was a tense and slightly dangerous time, like a border crossing between two conflicting countries. It’s not the deprivations of winter that get you, or the damp of spring, but the no-man’s land between.” The unpredictable weather, the dull and depressed fields. This resonated for me. When I lived and gardened on the Yorkshire Moors, I felt like this in March. Winter seemed endless, but it didn’t help to expect spring in March, because it just was too early. Now I’m in Virginia and we have weeks of work behind us by the end of March – winter is so much shorter.

During the maple syrup run, Kristin finds her feet, a job she excels at: evaporating the sap. She begins to love the work, seeing the connection between her actions and their consequences, believing in what she’s doing. She and Mark still argue a lot, with their different styles (passive-aggressive grudge-nurturer versus dog-like shaking of the issue.) Kristin sees that their arguments come from their two different basic fears: hers of poverty, debt and being enslaved to repayments; his of ruining themselves with overwork: “the farm gaining mass and speed until it ran over the farmer and squashed him.” He worried they’d be overwhelmed and life would not be fun anymore. Both problems are certainly deserving of fear. Organic farms fail most often from burnout or divorce. Kristin comments that they were fighting so much they could reach divorce before even reaching marriage.

Which farmer will not relate to this, my favorite quote from the book: “A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only things that must be done now, and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can’t, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. It’s blackmail, really.”

They somehow continue to build up the farm and by the time the ground has thawed [I wonder when that is in the Lake Champlain area?], they have seven paid up members for their CSA, and tensions recede. They have direction, purpose and a weekly goal. Neighbors and friends rally to help. The first week of their CSA they offer milk, meat, eggs, maple syrup and lard.

Once they reach June, the peak of the farming year, they are starting work at 3.45am and not finishing till 7pm (and even then they still have to lock up the chickens). Kristin even falls asleep on the seat of the cultivator. Mark seems to have “diabolical energy” and exuberance. Kristin is happy, working alongside Mark and walking the fields in the evenings, making more plans.

Kristin realizes “the things I admired most about him [Mark] in the abstract were what drove me nuts in the specific.” His beliefs were informed by his experiences and his research. He was uncomfortable with anything where he was unable to know and measure the impact – he wanted no part of it. He tried hard to live by his beliefs of low consumption, handmade items, responsible decisions. Kristin, for her part, was a hedonist with no particular ethic. Mark’s unbending strength carries him and the farm through very hard times. Unbending strength = rigidity = inflexibility = stubbornness. Kristin accommodates to Mark’s beliefs (perhaps another example of Mark’s good luck – without a partner like Kristin, flexible, hardworking, accepting,  he would not have made it)

The CSA membership reaches 30 by late summer. They realize the house will not be all fixed up in time for the wedding. Their “To Do” list includes “Find tables and chairs. Slaughter bull for ox roast. Butcher chickens for rehearsal dinner. Write vows.”  Kristin is still unsure she wants to marry Mark: “Poverty, unmitigated hard work, and a man whom, for all his good points, no reasonable person would describe as easy to be with.” She is very candid, very open about her doubts, to a level I feel uncomfortable with – it feeds my near-certainty that they’ll never make it. She is also very perceptive: “Marriage asks you to let go of a big chunk of who you were before, and that loss must be grieved. A choice for something and someone is a choice against absolutely everything else, and that’s one big fat goodbye.”

In October the wedding does happen (in case you too, were wondering), despite Kristin having flu and the baker having gone AWOL. It was a reflection of their farming: “exquisite, untidy, sublime and untamed”. I don’t know if the chicks arrived the same week, as originally planned. One month later, Kristin is on a two month writing assignment in Hawai’i. She feels a need to anchor herself by doing some farming, so she visits a vegetable grower. She is taken aback by the leisurely pace of harvesting, and records that that was the moment she made the emotional commitment to her marriage. She realizes the difficulties in her chosen life are hers by choice, and she can’t wait to get home.

When she gets home, Mark has settled into his own rhythm, and they work together looking for harmony, not for conflict. But this isn’t the sugar-coated happy-ever-after ending. Their marriage remains fiery. They engage a few interns each year, and employ some of the local people. CSA membership grows to a hundred. In year 4 their daughter is born and they buy part of the farm.

Kristin leaves us with these words of wisdom: “in my experience, tranquil and simple are two things farming is not. Nor is it lucrative, stable safe or easy. Sometimes the work is enough to make you weep.” And yet “A bowl of beans, rest for tired bones. . . . these things. . .  have comforted our species for all time, and for happiness’ sake they should not slip beneath our notice. Cook things, eat them with other people. If you can tire your own bones while growing the beans, so much the better for you.”

Phew! It worked out! Who needs suspense novels for winter reading when there are farming tales as gripping as this one? to read more, go to her website.