It is a shock when you hear experts get in wrong. I was at Gardening Scotland (Scotland's biggest gardening show) last weekend and was horrified with what I heard from a well known media garden expert. At a wildlife gardening debate that he chaired he was heard to say that "harvesting peat was sustainable only thin layer of peat was taken off the top of the bog and bogs grow 1 mm a year anyway ". So basically he said was it was fine to cut peat to use in gardens as the bogs grow back. Unfortunately this is very wrong. Flanders Moss took 7000 years to grow to what it is now but in the 1970's a 100 ha part of Flanders was prepared for peat "harvesting" by scraping the layer of vegetation off and putting in parallel drainage ditches. SNH managed to step in a buy out the peat planning permissions to prevent peat being actually dug and save the bog but not before this area was left dry, dusty and with no bog plants or animals on it at all. Since then we have been damming ditches to rewet the area and restore living bog and this has brought back sphagnum to parts of it but after all this time some areas still are only bare peat and heather with no sphagnum . It may take 100's of years before it is covered with a complete living bog skin.
So quite simply peat "harvesting" (even this word is wrong as it implies an annually produced crop) in not sustainable. Any bog where it happens is at best irreparably damaged and at worst killed (above is a picture of a bog undergoing "harvesting", see no green at all). The simple fact is that if you use peat then it has come from a bog somewhere that is being destroyed so if you want to save wonderful plants and animals like the ones that you see in this blog then don't listened to the so called gardening experts that say it is alright to use peat but make your own by home composting. Before the 2 world war virtually no-one used peat in their gardens but they still managed to create wonderful growing areas so it is possible to grow big veg and beautiful flowers not at the cost of bog wildlife.
So quite simply peat "harvesting" (even this word is wrong as it implies an annually produced crop) in not sustainable. Any bog where it happens is at best irreparably damaged and at worst killed (above is a picture of a bog undergoing "harvesting", see no green at all). The simple fact is that if you use peat then it has come from a bog somewhere that is being destroyed so if you want to save wonderful plants and animals like the ones that you see in this blog then don't listened to the so called gardening experts that say it is alright to use peat but make your own by home composting. Before the 2 world war virtually no-one used peat in their gardens but they still managed to create wonderful growing areas so it is possible to grow big veg and beautiful flowers not at the cost of bog wildlife.
