Saturday 31 May 2014

Organic gardeners do not use peat...

And in any normal context I wouldn't even consider it. 

However at college, in one of the compost bins that we 'manage' [even though other people put things like whole trees in there and we have to regularly take them out again] I found someone had emptied around 10 very large pots into it. They had obviously bought the pots, filled with peat and mixed shedloads of slow release fertiliser in, planted them up and then forgotten to water them. So the plants died and instead of r-eusing the pots, they had been tipped straight into our [until then] organic compost bin. 



A dilemma then ensued.

As a group, we have no funds to buy compost so we make our own. And this peat is in fine condition, barely used. Seriously a complete waste of resources. What to do..leave it, where the fertiliser [not needed] will continue to rot down and infest our lovely compost....bin it as it is not organic or take it out, remove the remaining roots and fertiliser pellets and just bin the pellets and reuse the compost in our own pots. 

Of course, the cornerstone of organic gardening is that if you try to spend no money...you would be pretty much organic even if you don't know much about organic gardening...and on that note I decided that there was no way I could let this precious resource slip through the net. 

So we have been sieving and picking out all the balls of fertiliser...and all the roots...and mixing it with our own leaf mould to bulk it up and using it for our potting mix

I would never buy peat, I find that my own compost and leaf mould mix is more than adequate and our dalek compost added to worm compost is wonderful for the more greedy cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes grown in pots; whilst everything else is fine in the ground...but I just can't see this resource thrown away and added to a general compost mix that won't get used until after I have left the college. 

So for the first year in many, I have used peat. Weird.



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