Peat for your garden, or coir?
If you stop in at a garden centre and mention that the soil in your garden is all heavy and clumpy, somebody’s likely to point you to the bags of peat moss, which you can mix into your soil to lighten it up. It’s great stuff, but where does all that peat come from? Peat bogs, apparently, and getting the peat out of bogs and into your garden doesn’t sound like the best thing for the environment.
The Independent reports that gardeners in the UK are being urged to stop using peat-based compost.
Launching the campaign at Kew Gardens in west London yesterday, Mr Benn said:
Amateur gardeners are by far the biggest users of peat, using over 2 million cubic metres each year. Our research shows us that gardeners often don’t realise the damage that peat extraction causes or that the compost they’re buying contains peat.The launch was backed by Mr Gavin, who said:
Using peat-free products in the home and garden is one of the simplest yet most effective ways that people can make a positive environmental impact and reduce their carbon footprint. For most uses in the garden, for example, pots, growbags, hanging baskets, digging into or tidying up flowerbeds, peat-free alternatives are just as good as peat-based compost, and they don’t lead to the loss of our valuable peat bogs.[continue]
One alternative-to-peat product is coir or coco peat – fibres from coconuts. Gardeners are talking about this stuff, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for it. Haven’t seen any coir for sale on Gabriola yet, but I did find some in Nanaimo last week at the Long Lake Nursery. The brand they’re selling is Beats Peat. I bought some to try.
Update: Related article: The dirt about peat moss – gardenrant.com
Filed in gardening 9 Comments so far
9 Responses to “Peat for your garden, or coir?”
Joan on 16 Mar 2010 at 1:26 pm #
Britain has a limited supply of peat bogs, but I find it hard to think of Canada as being short of peat. That being said, I don’t know where the peat one buys in garden centres comes from. But surely coconut byproducts must have a greater ecological footprint for us than peat would.
Gabriolan on 16 Mar 2010 at 9:43 pm #
I’d love to know which does have the greater ecological footprint for us: peat or coir. The Canadian peat industry says what they’re doing is all good. Of course. Others have concerns about harvesting peat from bogs, like the writer of this article.
I think one of the selling points of coir is that that coconuts are being harvested anyway, so it makes sense to put coconut waste materials to use. On the other hand, coconuts don’t exactly grow in our neighbourhood, do they? So one would have to factor in the cost of transporting coir around the world. What impact does that have on the environment?
I think the best solution would be for all of us to compost and manage our gardens in such a way that we would need neither coir nor peat. I’m not sure how realistic that is, at least right now.
Viv on 17 Mar 2010 at 9:01 am #
I have actually purchased the coconut fiber on Gabriola. Wild Rose has it. We used it instead of bark on a garden where we didn’t want things to grow. And nothing did grow. So I am wondering; is this stuff actually okay to mix into your garden where you do, in fact, want things to grow?
Joan on 20 Mar 2010 at 11:03 pm #
OK, did a very small amount of research on this – most peat extraction for garden purposes in Canada is from New Brunswick, so it likely does travel a long way to Gabriola. Canada is the biggest peat producer in the world. I don’t think the argument that we are depleting our rare peatlands, presented in the original article for the UK, holds at all for Canada, though. Peat extraction has affected 125 km2, or about 0.01% of canuck peatlands. However, it does indeed take a long time to turn sphagnum moss into peat (2000 years or so), and peatlands may be regionally ecologically important. The most interesting aspect is the greenhouse gas balance – as, when using peat, you are taking carbon that was in storage for a very long time and releasing it, through decomposition, to the atmosphere – this decomposition is the main source of greenhouse gases from the industry.
Below is a link to study that did an analysis of emissions from the various components of the Canadian peat extraction industry – here is their breakdown of sources of greenhouse gas emissions: Decomposition, land use change, the transport of peat to market, and extraction and processing comprised 71%, 15%, 10%, and 4%, respectively.
It says in this article that the greenhouse gas budget for producing/using coir and other peat substitutes is ‘not known’.
[Editor's note: Joan linked to an article at amio.allenpress.com, but the web address didn't work when others tried to view that page. I've removed the broken link.]
cheryl on 21 Mar 2010 at 8:44 am #
Sorry Joan we tried the link you provided but there seems to be an error and we are unable to bring it up.
Gabriolan on 21 Mar 2010 at 9:59 am #
Sorry about that broken link. The website Joan visited seems to be doing a weird thing that prevents other people from linking directly to one of their articles.
Anyway, here’s how to get to that article: [Edited to remove these directions, as they no longer work. Try doing a web search for the article title if you'd like to read this article.]
This search produces only one result: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Canadian Peat Extraction, 1990–2000: A Life-cycle Analysis. I think that’s the article Joan was looking at. Click full text to read the article.
Joan, thanks so much for the research you did!
Andrea on 21 Mar 2010 at 10:39 am #
Viv – yes, you can grow things very well in a garden where coir has been mixed in. I have a friend who is an amazing gardener who switched over entirely from peat to coir a couple of years ago and swears by the stuff as a garden additive. I think the difference from what you were doing with it before to keep things from growing was that you probably spread it on the surface to smother anything coming up, like you would do with bark. But if you soak the coir to soften it, break it up, and mix it into the soil then it works just like the peat. One thing my friend particularly likes about it is that it is shipped in relatively small blocks. Once you soak those in water, maybe in a wheelbarrow, they expand to several times the original size. So they are much more space efficient to store than peat, and perhaps a bit more efficient to ship, which might reduce their carbon footprint.
I don’t use either peat or coir myself – I made the choice to build soil quality entirely on compost and manure, although I’m sure I would get there faster by using some of these other additives.
Joan on 21 Mar 2010 at 5:32 pm #
Sorry about the broken link – don’t you hate it when people do that. That is, indeed, the right article.
Gabriolan on 22 Mar 2010 at 9:16 pm #
Joan — I do hate it very much when people do that! Thanks for confirming that the link is the right one.