Read our musings on parts 1 & 2.
Full disclosure: peat bans are in our financial interests, so we have publicly supported them for years.
It’s nothing personal against people who want to grow with peat: we liked growing with peat too.
We don’t specialise in the plants that most benefit from peat, we already harvested rainwater and had a modern irrigation system, so it was quite simple to phase out peat without significant extra costs.
Episode 3
Hortweek’s Episode 3: the cost of trial and error shows how polarising the peat ban is.
It makes things sounds bad for a total peat ban, especially for the horticulture industry, starting off with an emphatic statement from a small nursery owner in Huddersfield.
“You wouldn’t expect a builder to build a house, but don’t use sand, use dog 💩. There’s nobody sticking up for our industry.”
Tony Johnson – P B Horticultural
- The nurseries that have had success with peat free potting soil have often spent more money, energy, water, and fertiliser to grow smaller plants in a given growing period.
- There have been many costly failures by experienced growers, sometimes due to the lack of consistency in peat free mixes, exacerbated by inconsistent British weather.
- Growers who bravely went all peat free in one year generally had terrible results!
- More high-tech, expensive irrigation systems solve a lot of problems of using peat free at scale.
- Eliot Barden at Majestic Trees points out that trials typically take years. Some plant species will be easy to grow without peat, but we mustn’t focus on the easy wins, rather the plants that struggle.
- Small, local nurseries, especially run by seasoned folk over 60, don’t need these problems and will just close down.
- The whole reason for banning peat is to protect the environment, but many alternatives are little better, for example coconut coir must be industrially washed using clean water, then transported around the world.
- The problem is especially bad for ericaceous plants, which love peat’s natural acidity and stability. Peat free alternatives are costly to acidify, then they decay after one growing season, where peat lasts for at least 2 seasons.
- Steve Harper at Southern Trident, a coir based soil company based in India and the UK, is confident that their peat free products can serve 95-97% of plants. However, he agrees there should be a realistic exception for plants that naturally thrive in peat, and struggle in expensive peat free substitutes.
The voices on the side of the peat ban struggle to make conclusive points:
- Growers have heard discussions of a peat ban for over 20 years.
- Help is available from the RHS and the potting soil companies.
- But the burden of testing all these new potting mixes, with new watering & feeding regimes, is on the grower.
- Ongoing testing is part of any plant nursery’s life, but it’s hard for a small business to do complex Research & Development with so many variables.
- Some home growers have had good results with some plants. Jonathan Sheppard grows Cosmos in his garden polytunnel, and recommends Melcourt SylvaGrow. He is enthusiastic about peat free, but is straightforward when he acknowledges that while “decent plants can be grown entirely without peat, in terms of plant health I wouldn’t really like to comment as I can’t base this on any science.”
- Sam Rivers, the bravest technical manager in the potting soil industry, points out that if we could predict the weather each year, we could adjust peat free potting mixes on a yearly basis to accommodate drought or drizzle.
Nikki Barker is literally our favourite RHS Peat Free Transition Coordinator, and she is at work here, so we mean no harassment.
On behalf of her employer, the charitable RHS, Nikki suggests that a roadmap for the future includes veteran growers packing up and retiring for good, because it’s not profitable to invest in the changes necessary to grow without peat; it’s too late in the game for them.
Meanwhile, young, green behind the ears growers shall fill their place, willingly shouldering the costs of peat free growing because they share the necessary ecological vision.
The podcast ends with two points to tease the final episode:
- Houseplants produced in the UK are practically all peat free now, and have jumped up in price accordingly, unlike European imports.
- The UK needs to import a lot of plants from Europe, where there are no peat bans on the table.
Episode 4
Episode 4: a whole new take on horticulture starts off with a couple of positive peat story about Greenwood Plants, a major glasshouse based wholesale nursery, and Rob Dowling, manager at Hyde Park Nursery, which grows plants for the Royal Parks.
They were ahead of the game, went about it the smart way with lots of testing, and acknowledge up front that peat free growing requires a new education for growers.
Every important detail of growing a plant in a pot is different, and using the right, gritty peat free mix for seeds is crucial.
- A peat ban would protect peat free British growers from competition by European growers that use peat.
- But the UK horticulture industry relies on imports of plants from Europe, especially small plug plants, which are generally grown using peat.
- A ban would protect British peat free business from cheaper European plants, but it’s not realistic for the UK to produce that many plants from start to finish domestically.
- UK growers can grow small plug plants on in a peat free mix: should that be considered peat free, at least for several more years?
- 8 major plant nurseries in the Netherlands that supply the UK were interviewed, and 6 are doing peat free trials. The UK market is close to 10% of their business.
- British buyers are not strongly motivated to pay more for peat free plants. Price, quality, and plants being ready on time are more important to people’s buying decisions.
- Guy Watts at Architectural Plants favours a compromise approach of reducing peat over a full ban, noting that this could be best all round, including for the environment.
- Ken Cox at Glendoick Gardens thinks that taxing peat is a workable solution, with exemptions for a few plant groups that naturally grow in peaty soils, and giving the horticulture industry 5 more years.
- It’s worth reminding everyone that while peat bans have been a government pledge since 2022, there are no clear plans at this time, hence the open letter to the Prime Minister that we signed.
- Because there is no ban yet, there is no clarity about the pot of government gold that comes with one: subsidies, which could include support for growers who lose profitable crops due to teething problems with peat free.
- The RHS itself won’t go peat free until 2026, and the Chelsea Flower Show has a policy to account for “legacy peat” after 2026.
- The peat free garden at Hampton Court featured in July’s Flower Show: here’s the plant list.
- The presenter closes with a series of fantastic questions that we won’t answer: “Has peat free become a scapegoat for all our gardening problems? Is the peat ban a False God that will yield an array of unintended consequences? Or is it simply the right thing to do, and we just need to make sure it’s done right?”
- Technical Editor Sally Drury pulls no punches in the last round, musing on the future of plant breeding to create peat free resistant varieties, and offering up a prayer for the new gardeners at home who will fall to despair due to their peat free plant failures.
The last word goes to Jonathan Sheppard, a former political lobbyist turned Cosmos grower who supports a peat ban, and knows how these political things go.
“all legislation has unintended consequences … some [government] decisions … can be quite ludicrous and ridiculous because they haven’t got all the information, perhaps [the decisions] get amended or changed or influenced”.