For decades, garden experts have spoken out against the use of peat as potting compost, pointing out that it’s not only bad for the environment, but bad for your plants as well.
Now BBC Gardeners’ World expert Monty Don has issued the clearest condemnation yet, saying that using the still-popular peat-based composts is “bad gardening”.
Writing in the Gardeners’ World magazine, Monty said: “Let me be very clear, there is no excuse or reason to use peat under any circumstances. To do so is, at best, naive and uninformed. Using peat is simply bad gardening. Just say no.”
Using peat isn’t as traditional as it might seem. It was only in the mid-20th century that the horticultural industry in Britain starting promoting peat.
The reasoning behind the switch to peat had little to do with gardening, and was in fact much more to do with economics. Peat’s lower weight made it cheaper to transport, and thus more profitable.
By the 1980s, conservationists were raising concerns about peat’s environmental impact, but 40 years on, peat-based potting compost is still on sale in garden centres up and down the country.
The harm that peat does to the environment is worsened by the fact that it’s a sterile medium that’s not at all good for growing plants. As a result manufacturers tend to add “wetting agents” – essentially detergents – to break up the surface tension of water, because otherwise plants planted in peat couldn’t survive.
Monty adds that, as a child, he was often handed the unenviable job of sieving home-made garden compost: “When I was a child, we never bought seed or potting compost. It was made entirely from sieved leaf mould, loam from turf stacks …and a little sieved garden compost,” he said.
“I confess that, as a nine or ten-year-old, I thought sieving these things was one of the worst jobs of all and dreaded it. But the results were invariably good. So when I started to garden again as an adult, I returned to this method without any notion of a formula or precise proportions.”
Monty has a small army of unwitting helpers when it comes to making compost: “I sometimes use soil from mole hills, but though it’s excellent, it does contain weed seeds and is less open than loam from a turf stack.”
He adds that any kind of home-made compost is likely to produce its fair share of weeds, but Monty’s not bothered by that: “I regard this as a healthy sign and weeding them out is no problem,” he says.
