Amazing Seeds - Peat = Bad

 

90% of our garden is in this package

It struck me as I was poring over the directions on how to plant the vegetables and flowers this year just how amazing it is that just about every plant and vegetable we'll be harvesting next summer, every tomato, every squash, every cucumber, every pea, every giant sunflower, every pumpkin, every zucchini, every beet, every carrot is currently contained in a tiny packet inside this one envelope (pictured above). 

It's worth noting here that planning the garden took a lot longer than I thought it would. I figured I'd snap off a draft in an afternoon. It ended up being a few afternoons spread over a few weeks. 

Planning ahead is a good idea, because some of the seed providers start to run out in February. This has been our experience.

I have engaged smug-mode  over buying a couple more T-5 fluorescent lights for the mini-greenhouses last summer when they were $20. They're now up to $40 a piece. 

According to the plan, we're going to need 316 starter pots this year. That's quite a number. 

It's something that we need to think about because we don't want to use peat pots. It's been well known for some time now that using peat is amazingly destructive. See this Washington Post article from 2017. 

Peatlands store a third of the world’s soil carbon, and their harvesting and use releases carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas driving climate change. The biggest environmental risk from peatlands is if they catch fire, which happened spectacularly in 2015 in Indonesia on land cleared for plantations. Peatland fires account for up to 5 percent of human-caused carbon emissions, according to the United Nations, which last year launched a peatlands conservation initiative.

What is amazing is that if you go to most retailers, they're still hocking tons of peat pots for gardening. Of course, many of these come wrapped in plastic. 

I accidentally bought quite a few of these last year. Or, rather, I bought them and then found out later about the destruction peat mining is causing and regretted it. 

This year the plan is to re-use the peat pots that I purchased with my ill-informed decision making last year, supplement this with plastic pots we acquired while buying other plants and also upcycled yoghurt and peanut butter containers. 

Toilet paper rolls are another thing you'll see advocated from time to time. We did not have good luck with these last year, and so we won't be using them. 

If we need to get more, we'll buy the slightly more expensive coconut coir pots.