Connemara peat. Copyright © Rick Payette 2007 under Creative Commons licence by-nc-nd
Within the complex drama that plays out day by day across the British landscape, the peat bog gets triple billing – as unique wildlife habitat, carbon sink, and critical element in the management of wetlands. But this talk of utility somehow manages entirely to bypass the beauty and wonder of such a unique part of our natural heritage. In the UK and Ireland, peat bogs have been described as our rain forests – the metaphor is fitting both in terms of the richness of flora and fauna they contain, and their vulnerability.
To get at the peat, a bog must first be drained, then denuded of all surface vegetation. The partially decayed vegetable matter of which peat consists accrues within the bogs at a rate of one millimetre a year, while commercial extraction will strip well over two hundred times this depth within the same period. And while the horticultural industry will, with some justification, point out that their use of this resource is dwarfed by that of other players – most notably the power industry – the move to protect native peat bogs by importing almost 70 per cent of its peat from Ireland and continental Europe merely outsources our own environmental footprint.
Industry loves peat because it’s inexpensive, light, and it holds water and air well. Did I mention it’s light? This is critical, because it makes it cheap to transport. It also has a habit of growing in great swathes of land no-one much cares about or can work out what else to do with. Horticulturalists have been raised for decades on how to get the very best out of peat as a growing medium while managing its failings, chiefly that it’s highly resistant to rewetting should it dry out. This makes it pretty usable within professionally designed industrial systems, but far from ideal for amateur gardeners.
I’m in no way a professional grower, but gardening for myself and other people I’ve used both peat-based potting composts as well as their peat-free alternatives. I’ve come to appreciate that there are good and bad points with both. But I’d go further than that.
When it comes to gardening, I’m just not sure peat’s all it’s cracked up to be.
Rather, I think we just got used to growing with it, taking advantage of its benefits, but also getting to the stage where making allowances for its shortcomings became second nature. An entire industry has built up around the use of a finite natural resource, which we’ve chosen to plunder rather than to protect.
It’s kind of like this.
Imagine that you’re a chef, or something within the catering and hospitality industry and, for whatever bizarre and highly unlikely reason, the only kind of bread you can get your hands on is pizza dough. And this situation persists for years – the pizza dough is plentiful and cheap and any other kind of flour is almost impossible to get hold of anyway. So you build your business around pizza dough, and for five or ten years people are eating pizzas until it starts to get boring, but gradually you build up an entire cuisine based around pizza dough so you’re doing incredibly delicious and varied things with it. And all the millers and the logistics companies are set up to just-in-time-deliver it to your door, and all the kitchens are tooled up to bake with it and fitted with the most amazing shiny pizza ovens, but that’s the only way to bake because, after fifty years now, that’s just how it’s done. You say it’s “how it’s always been done” (though in truth, your ‘always’ measures little more than half a century). Anything else would be crazy – inferior, expensive, unreliable – of inconsistent quality when you’re trying to run a business. The catering and hospitality industry runs on pizza dough.
But then the do-gooders come along and point out that sourdough and brioche and a nice malted granary loaf and, oh, I don’t know, maybe even some gluten-free fare, are actually delicious and infinitely superior – but you can’t cook that stuff in a pizza oven, which is too hot for anything but a flat, really high gluten dough, and your entire staff is skilled up to work with pizza dough and nothing else. So, understandably, you get a bit defensive, and tell them they don’t know what they’re talking about.
And then they hit you with the ethical stuff, the stuff you’re grandfather never had to think about, but has been nagging away at you maybe, an increasingly insistent voice at the back of your mind, and they remind you that intrinsic to the harvesting of the flour for pizza dough is a process that causes kittens to become depressed. They mope about, go off their food, and treat a ball of yarn with utter indifference. And this is happening across the country.
And now it’s time to roll out the big guns, because what started as a few liberal snowflakes harping on about brioche now has the potential to grow into a consumer movement, all clamouring for something other than pizza-based breads and all horrified at the notion of sad kittens. So you get together with your industry buddies and hire PR companies to rebut this nonsense, pointing out the delectability of pizza and the untried nature of these crazy Johnny-come-lately breads, and you rope in the odd scientist and call upon nutritionists to prove with stats and studies how pizza is so much better for you than any other bread could possibly be.
Meanwhile the kitten thing is still nagging away, so you try to engage with that directly, and you bring your unassailable logic to bear, saying; “Well, cats aren’t dogs, are they? I mean, they might purr a bit, but they’re never very happy to see you. A dog never goes about with that supercilious expression, looking so aloof. If the kittens get a little sad, well, that’s life, they’ll probably cheer up in a while and are you seriously suggesting you’re going to stop eating all these delicious pizza-based goods based on the frown of pusscat? And anyway there’s the power industry over here that’s actually forcing millions of kittens to CRY every day in order to generate electricity, streams of misery running down their furry little cheeks, just so you can charge your iPad... so that makes what we’re doing just a drop in the [lachrymose feline] ocean.”
But you can feel the momentum slipping away from your side, and slowly but surely the food landscape starts to change. This is partly down to rise of the artisan baker, who can produce kitten-friendly baked goods on a small scale but at a higher unit price that consumers are still willing to pay, and use the internet to get her product to market. But also, people figure out a way to bake their own bread, and they’re not buying pizza dough and building pizza ovens, they’re paying the extra for these other, less ethically compromised grains and flours, and doing it themselves. Still others, less well-off, are just growing their own grain, coming together in cooperatives to pool resources and mill their own flour. Admittedly, at first, the results are a bit hit and miss, but there’s a movement building, an excitement around these new breads until, with a quiet inevitability, the eating habits of a nation are transformed, and an industry is dragged reluctantly into accepting its responsibilities. And the kittens are happy again.
And you take your delicious brioche with you on your evening walk, gazing out as the sun sets across the wide, western sea, to the land of pizza dough and crying baby cats, and wonder what kind of bread would wrap best around chlorinated chicken.
Peat-free potting composts
These are my favourite peat-free composts right now for the home gardener.
Dalefoot Composts https://www.dalefootcomposts.co.uk/
Melcourt SylvaGrow https://www.melcourt.co.uk/products/gardener/peat-free-composts/
Please check here to find your local independent plant nursery, and ask them if they’re delivering peat-free compost.
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Hello! I’m Andrew, gardener, writer, photographer, and owner of a too-loud laugh, and I’m so pleased you’ve found your way to Gardens, weeds & words. You can read a more in-depth profile of me on the About page, or by clicking this image.
