For Peat's sake, moss an effective addition to soil

5:19 PM, Aug. 20, 2013  |  Comments

Pardon my drunken walk, but after a personal tour of a Canadian peat moss production site, I got my bouncy, elbows-out bog-walking jaunt back.

A bit of background: A couple of decades ago, professional garden writers, being self-proclaimed saviors of the environment, got our knickers in a knot over the ruination of Canada by peat moss harvesters. The naturally composted sphagnum moss takes thousands of years to form and was being dug and shipped all over the world to satisfy nurserymen and gardeners in need of soil amendments.

The stuff is wonderful. Unlike dense Irish peat, which is nearly gone after being carved into bricks and burned in fireplaces, Canadian peat is light and fluffy. It can break up clay soils for better drainage, yet helps sandy soils hold moisture. It's perfect in potting soils for its light weight and moisture holding capacity.

But for all practical purposes, when peat is dug out of the ground, it is gone forever. However, I wasn't convinced that the peat harvesters were up to no good, so I became an inspector, visiting the sites to see what they are up to.

Turns out, it is a lot of hullabaloo about not much. Peat bogs are acidic wetlands covered with small trees, wild blueberries and cranberries, native orchids, pitcher plants, ferns and sphagnum moss. Not much else. It is wet in most places and so springy to the step trees bend towards you as you walk by them. Harvesters scrape off the top stuff, drain the area, then suck up the dried peat moss, thin layers at a time, using huge tractor-driven vacuum machines.

But get this: Then they spread the top stuff back over the area, and within just a couple of years the area starts to look like it did before they started. And in the decades since they started digging the peat they've barely harvested a tiny fraction of one percent of the available peat. We will never get around to using it up, and it doesn't harm anything anyway. And peat use is down anyway, because of increased local composting practices. I only use it in my potting soil, not in garden soil.

So, 20 years after my first visit to the Canadian peat bogs, I am still satisfied that even the minuscule harvested portions of vast Canadian peat bogs are healthy as ever. I'm cool with how peat guys are operating.

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