Last week again the Horticultural Trades Association said, again, that a ban on peat use in horticulture would be disastrous for the horticulture industry, and added into that that it could also risk food security. which made my ears perk up as that felt like an inflammatory comment. My spidey sense told me it aws likely propaganda but I needed to do some research and look into what they meant.
Now it’s zero surprise to anyone I hope that lots of plants that end up in our garden centres start off life as plug plants, which are grown onto firstly 9cm and then 1-3 lite pot sizes. Indeed gardeners can buy plugs from merchants like Thompson and Morgan and Sarah Raven. Plug production is highly mechanised, as is any potting production today, and there will be no surprise that potting machines are set up to manage a specific type of compost. There is nothing to say that needs to be peat based, but it does need to be free flowing and free of pieces of wood and sticks because they are likely, and do, create blockages in the machinery. As we are all aware peat free compost that is made from green waste is often a bit woody and whilst there is nothing wrong with that as what can be described as an end user, it is frustrating on nurseries as it slows work down when machines get clogged.
However, and this is an important point, peat based composts also often clog up machinery. In fact having thought about this I began to recall some of the things we found in peat based composts on nurseries prior to turning peat free, and they include glass, plastic, string and twine amongst other things, all of which clog up any type of compost hopper/potting machinery.
But let’s get back to plugs. And we can look at this statment from the HTA with new eyes this week, as Tesco announced peat free bedding and Delfland Organics, an enormous plug supplier to the agricultural trade, announced all their plugs would be peat free, and in both cases, with immediate effect, proving that it can be done.
Plugs are great things. They allow for a huge amount of material to be propagated in a very small space, using relatively small amounts of growing medium, and cuttings and seeds grow on particularly well in plugs that have been carefully designed to allow root and top growth to be at an optimal when the plugs are fully rooted out and ready to grow on. They are efficient and whilst gardeners at home may not focus on efficiency that allow plants to be grown fast, and therefore the end price is better to the consumer. It also means that nurseries can buy plugs of various sizes to grow on, and not have to undertake the propagation of the stock but just grow it on. Whilst this might seem a bit like cheating to some, it’s actually often the best way for nurseries with limited space to grow stock. Distributing plugs is also far less work as you can get literally thousands of plants into one delivery. Great for the supplier but somewhat daunting for the nursery facing a delivery of thousands of tiny plants……
But, I was confused by the comments about food security until I chatted to a farmer pal, about how plugs are used in field scale farming. In order to avoid use of pesticides and herbicides brassica and salad plugs in particular, grown onto a specific size will grow on fast, outcompeting the weeds and coping with a hit from slugs and flea beetle and holding back any need to spray. Presumably what was meant by the HTA was that a ban would stop plug production, but my guess is that as Delfland Organics have started to grow peat free, that threat is actually untrue, and what we need to ensure is that there is a stable product available for plug growers to use. This is likely to rely on coir I would imagine, mixed with a green waste compost and likely needing to be sieved for plug production. Certainly those of us who grow on a market gardening scale grow what are technically our own plugs in modules each year and thus far in the last twelve months a mix of our own made compost with coir is the best potting and seed sowing compost we can find that is affordable. So yet again all of this goes back to ensuring that there is enough green waste in the system, and that it is composted well and available to horticulture and agriculture at an affordable cost.
With Peat Free April in full swing it’s easy to focus on what hasn’t been done, but actually when the large organisations such as Tesco, who are the largest supplier of bedding plants in the UK apparently, and Delfland prove it’s perfectly possible to be peat free, and presumably have put their money into finding ways to ensure they can be peat free, it’s astounding that we are even still having the conversation. In fact in reality it’s making the loud voices in the corner look a little silly, not unlike th uncle at a wedding reception still dancing like it is the 1970s whilst all around him giggle and prove it’s not.To quote Jessica Yellin, a US based news broadcaster, we need to make sure we listen to the news and not the noise……
