The government has promised to restore our peatlands with a vision to end peat use in horticultural products by 2030 in its 25-year environment plan.
Published at the start of 2018, the strategy outlines that organic or peat soils make up 11% of England’s total land area, over 70% of which are drained or in poor condition.
2011 saw the introduction of a voluntary target for amateur gardeners to phase out the use of peat by 2020 and a final voluntary phase-out target of 2030 has been declared for professional growers of fruit, vegetables and plants.
Plenty of companies are already on board and some are way ahead of the curve. One leading growing media manufacturer – Melcourt, has been supplying peat alternatives for 30 years. “Having supplied bark-based growing medium ingredients since the 1980s it was a logical move to develop a range of peat-free ready-to-use media as the market for non-peat was expanding,” says Catherine Dawson, technical director for Melcourt.
“By the year 2000, Sylvamix® was in place and since then it has gone on to become the market-leading range, amply demonstrating that it is entirely possible to grow cost-effective ornamentals without the use of peat.
“Considerable investment in state of the art mixing machinery was followed by a maxi-bale plant and a further bagging line has just been installed which will further increase the speed and efficiency of manufacture,” she says.
Melcourt has long been a supplier into both the landscape market where it probably offers the widest range of bark-based mulches and soil improvers found anywhere in the UK suiting all applications and budgets, and the professional grower market where it numbers some of the UK’s finest growers among its customers for peat-free growing media.
One of the hurdles that Melcourt had to overcome in developing the Sylvamix peat-free growing media was the legacy left by the many very poorly developed peat-free products that came onto the market in the early days of the debate about peat.
Confidence was lost by growers and it has been a slow process to demonstrate that peat-free growing can be as safe and effective as the peat-based equivalent. “We have always taken immense care over the development and testing of our products,” says Catherine.
“We absolutely understand that a bad batch of compost has the potential to do great damage to the business of our grower customers, so we just don’t take any chances.”
Melcourt has its own trial site where both development of new media and most importantly, testing of current ones is undertaken in a thorough and rigorous way. “There are no shortcuts”, says Catherine, “and anyone supplying this market has to understand that.”
Melcourt has been very involved in an industry-wide task force, supported by Defra, to develop a method of distinguishing a more responsibly-sourced growing medium from a less responsibly-sourced one. The task force has included representatives from all sides of the industry and most importantly has included the conservation bodies such as the RSPB, the RHS but also the big retailers such as B&Q and Homebase as well as the manufacturers and growers.
Having such a wide group has resulted in a scheme that the whole industry backs and as such it should move the whole subject along in a much more positive, less polarized way than in previous years. It will allow purchasers of growing media a more transparent way to assess the degree to which the growing medium in question has impacted in terms of the energy and water required to make it, the habitat and biodiversity impacts, pollution created, social impacts, waste generated and the renewability of the ingredients. The scheme is approaching completion and Melcourt ae looking forward to being one of the first companies to sign up.
