The use of peat moss in your orgainc garden.

Peat moss is as natural and organic a soil conditioners as you can get; however, there are some environmental concerns as to the use of the material in your garden. In the first place, peat bogs are endangered. There is only a finite amount of peat left in the world and when it is gone there will be nothing to replace it. Second, peat moss contains large amounts of carbon and active peat bogs remove an estimated 110 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. Finally, there are about 562 billion tons of carbon stored in the worlds remaining peat bogs. If this peat is mined and allowed to decay in the soil this carbon will be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. It is for these reasons that most books on organic gardening do not discuss the use of peat moss in the garden, other than to discourage the practice. Having said this, peat moss is a wonderful organic soil conditioner and there undoubtedly is a place for it in your garden if you are willing to pay $30.00 for a small bail of the material. Peat moss has little nutritional value but is an extremely effective soil conditioner because it retains up to 20 times its weight in water. It is used to help break up and aureate heavy clay soils and to add water retaining organic material to sandy soils. Peat moss has a low pH, about 3.4 to 4.8, so it a particularly effect component of any material used to fertilize acid loving plants like azaleas, rhododendrons and roses. Finally, with respect to the environmental implications of using peat moss in your garden, I believe the plant life that thrive in your wonderful organic garden will remove far more carbon dioxide from the air you breath than is likely to be added by the decomposition of the few bails of peat you may add to the soil. With respect to the depletion of the peat bogs, the stuff is now so expensive that the economics of the situation will not allow this to happen. So, you have my permission to add a little peat to you garden if you a few dollars that are burning a hole in your pocket, just make sure the environmental police are not looking at you from that drone circling overhead! This is an excerpt from a book I am writing about organic gardening.