Peat compost is a con. Ditch it for the real stuff and enrich your life

There are plenty of people who argue that tackling climate change is one long Lenten fast. You can spot the voices that have big stakes in colonising ideas of what makes us happy. Women’s magazines long thrived on corroding our self esteem in order to sell us stuff to make us feel better. There will be many gaslighters in the road ahead mining the rifts for their own ends.

One of the principles of permaculture is a simple idea: the problem is the solution. Finally, hopefully, we are beginning to understand we have many problems and some of them contain big enriching solutions.

Every Irish household produces an average of more than 110kg of food waste every year. Yet we have an established horticultural practice of using peat moss as compost. Both are practices we simply have to stop. Peatlands are too important as carbon sinks and biodiversity hubs. Like oil and gas we need to keep peat firmly in the ground.

As part of their Grow With Us campaign An Taisce has done a great job explaining how life without peat compost is actually richer, and makes for healthier plants and money saved. Peat compost was a con, a term that combined ideas of one thing with something entirely different. Unlike real compost, peat moss contains no nutrients. It beats real compost only in its ability to hold water and provide a sterile (ie dead as doornails) medium for seeds to grow.

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Because of peat’s lack of nutrients, the plant that starts in peat moss is more likely to need synthetic fertilisers, which boost plant growth but make them more susceptible to disease so more chemicals are deployed in the lose-lose cycle of feed and spray.

Composting our food waste reduces the fossil fuels used to transport it to waste depots. By composting we begin to do what forests do. Left undisturbed, leaf litter and branches fall to the forest floor and create the kind of rich hummus that is the stuff of life. Recombining our food waste with woody material (and the An Taisce guide gives great step-by-step instructions), provides us with a free replacement for the garden dud, and climate and biodiversity catastrophe, that is peat moss. We make savings on waste charges, and are more connected to what’s being slung out. Our garden life gets richer and healthier and we can eat more nutrient dense food. There’s nothing drab about it. Composting taps into the whole technicolour richness of natural healthy systems. Start your composting career now and by next spring you could be knee deep in the good stuff.

Composting for Nature guide available online at antaisce.org

Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests