Non-green gardening - giving up peat

Peat is the partially decomposed remains of plants from peat bogs, primarily the Sphagnum, i.e., peat moss.  As such peat bogs are long-term repositories of carbon.  When that peat is "mined" and  removed from its low oxygen, low pH, water-logged environment, and spread around our gardens in the form of a soil additive or a potting mix or a starter pot, it finishes its decomposition rather quickly releasing all that stored carbon as carbon dioxide.  It's hard to think about giving up a common gardening practice because it's akin to coal mining and "dirty" coal, but it actually is, so we should.  And because peat bogs are drained so that the peat can be mined, a valuable wetland is destroyed, and the rather unique organisms that inhabit bogs have the habitat destroyed in the process.  Bogs like this formed very slowly, and they can regenerate, but they do so at a terribly slow rate, so peat use is like deforestation, a non-sustainable practice.  In this respect, TPP is as guilty as anyone.  In come places alternatives to peat, other bio-materials that would regularly decompose quickly anyways, are being sought, but so far TPP has seen no significant move in that direction in these parts.  The use of used newsprint and coconut fiber to make "peaty" pots is being to show up in the trade.  Fortunately the local municipality mulches and composts yard, garden, and wood waste which can be used to augment soil instead.  It's hard to get numbers on how big of a carbon footprint the use of peat generates; global warming is speeding up the decomposition of peat in nature as well.  Peat is more common in higher latitudes where the cold keeps things locked up for longer periods of time.  The peat problem is a particularly ironic one because gardeners in general like to think of themselves as the good guys, advancing the front of "green" living, and then it turns out our carbon footprint is bigger than anyone thought.  Besides peat is too valuable for other uses such as making that smoky malt used for whisky production.  The image above is the property of Kristian Peters, used under the terms of the Wikimedia Creative Commons. 

Bryophyte week - why Sphagnum matters

If your knowledge of Sphagnum moss starts and ends with the bale of soil additive in your garden shed, then this may come as a surprise. Sphagnum is a significant component of plant communities at high latitudes. It's a pretty nifty moss because it can hold 20-30 times its own weight in water because it's "leaves" (leafy organs called enations) are a reticulate network of chlorophyll bearing cells (stained green) surrounding large dead cells that take up water by capillary action. In a manner of speaking they are an aquatic organism that takes its water with it. Sphagnum bogs accumulate significant amounts biomass which means they are carbon reservoirs. Decomposition is very slow because of the low pH (acidic) and the cold climate. Eventually Sphagnum compacts into peat, which sometimes gets dug, dried, and burned to cure barley malt used to make Scotch whiskey. But as temperatures go up and winters get shorter, all that stored carbon gets released at a faster rate as shown by a number of studies way up north there in Scandinavian countries. Global warming vs. whiskey; OK, that's a non-starter as an issue. But this shows how cumulative small changes can result in a tipping point were all of a sudden carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises really fast, and everyone finally goes, gee, that's not good, but now it's too late.