Peat practice is not good for environment
DO you know what annoys me about garden centres?
I always have to wander around three times before finding the peat-free compost.
It’s almost as if they don’t want me to find it.
They want me to give up and buy their peaty products.
‘Three for the price of two!’
‘Win a free trip to a potato farm!’
It’s not very good for the environment is it?
One, because I am puffing and panting and driving further afield to get my compost, but, more importantly, it is using up a resource that is very difficult to replace.
Peat is an amazing phenomenon.
It is created with vegetation, gradually crushed beneath more vegetation, capturing carbon and storing it.
If this carbon escapes into the atmosphere it is a big factor in global warming and climate change.
We know these are not good things.
Sometimes when I am standing on our Astley Moss nature reserve, I look up at the railway line, built in the early 1800s and still running quite a few metres above the level of my head.
When this railway was first built on a floating platform, it was at the same level as the moss.
So, over a huge landscape, more than 90 per cent of the peat has now been extracted or drained for agriculture.
Imagine the amount of carbon that was lost.
These mosslands are our rain forests, destroyed by years of misuse.
While peat is no longer a popular fuel, it is still removed in industrial quantities around the world to add to your compost, for your flowers. Yet alternatives are already being made which are organic and just as good.
Along with the peat we also lost many plants and animals, like the Manchester Argus butterfly, carnivorous sundew and bladderwort and the bog bush cricket.
Losing plants and insects means that fewer birds are now on the mosses.
The Wildlife Trust is attempting to restore the mosslands to close to their former glory and reintroducing species that have been missing for 150 years.
And they are inviting people to come into these wildernesses just a few hundred yards from major centres of population like Salford, Wigan and Warrington.
Astley Moss, Highfield
Moss and Risley Moss are all places where you can see huge expanses of sphagnum moss, slowly creating new layers of peat – it will take thousands of years and all the wildlife that lives there.
Legendary birder Dave Steel keeps an eye on fluctuations of birds and other wild things. On average, Dave records around 80 different bird species every month; the wildlife is returning.