The Real Soil Company is encouraging the nation’s gardeners to go peat-free, but why does being peat-free matter and why should gardeners be reaching for peat-free?
The destruction of natural peat land in the UK has become an urgent issue for British growers. Peat is the largest land-based store of carbon and when it comes into contact with air, its carbon combines with oxygen and is released as harmful CO2 – one of biggest threats to our environment.
On top of that, huge areas of Lancashire, Yorkshire Northumberland, Cumbria, Scotland, East Anglia and parts of Cornwall are being lost to peat harvesting and wastage. A single square metre of peat takes 1,000 years to form and we are currently using it at a far greater rate than it is able to develop. With two million cubic metres still being sold in the UK each year, there is much we need to do to redress the balance in favour of environmentally safe options.
Going peat-free with the confidence to grow prize-winning flowers, fruit and vegetables has never been easier with The Real Soil Company, so why not make your peat-free pledge this spring? Your plants and grow-your-own plot will thank you, as will the environment.
One of the many reasons for a move away from peat is that the harvesting process is continually removing a natural finite resource which cannot be replaced. With every bag of growing media contributing to this issue, suppliers from across the market have had no choice but to look to more sustainable solutions. In the case of The Real Soil Company, they turned to the legacy of its parent company, Boughton.
From Boughton’s headquarters in rural Northamptonshire the company has been creating organic ‘as dug’ topsoils for decades and from this science the The Real Soil Company’s garden retail offering was born.
The material used in all The Real Soil Company’s topsoil products is typically sourced from pre-construction and construction sites from the counties surrounding Northamptonshire. Not only are these topsoils completely natural, organic and peat-free but they are, in theory, a waste product and not drawn from finite sources.
Once removed from site, The Real Soil Company’s soil scientists closely inspect and screen the material before use. It is important to note that recycled soils are never used as they cannot be relied on to be of a consistent quality.
