Please stop using peat products

Hydra-Fibre is a great alternative to peat.

natureboygrower said:

Screen it Einstein

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It was a rhetorical question...

The effort of trying to recover coco from a massive rootball isn't worth my time.

m4s73r said:

I mean im all for sustainability but your not going to stop commercial nurseries from using it. your not going to stop the 19-4-23 guys from dumping sunshine mix after every grow. Nor are you going to stop FFOF from being dumped every grow.

An argument could be made that you dont care about the environment if you live in a house, eat beef, or drive a car. You can do a lot more for the environment by being vegan and homeless with out a car then stopping using peat. Id argue that maybe instead of telling people to not use peat, teach how to reuse said peat for years to come. Teach how to make leaf mold and use a composter. I bought peat based soil and have been growing in it for 7 years. Teach that shit.

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All of my medium is either recycled or we use it in the garden as mulch. Nothing is dumped. My house is built on old mine workings, the soil was crap. After years of mulching with spent compost we actually have something worth growing in.

I will continue to use peat for life. Mostly because I don't want to change my name to CocoPhreak or DirtPhreak.

I am happy to do without peat, I have done for nearly a year now. I was worried at first, but it actually made little difference.

I tried for a few tries to get shredded leaves to work, doesn't work...tried perlite and sticks mixed in...doesn't work. Something about the tannin in the leaves i think just kills the concept from the word go.

mudballs said:

I tried for a few tries to get shredded leaves to work, doesn't work...tried perlite and sticks mixed in...doesn't work. Something about the tannin in the leaves i think just kills the concept from the word go.

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We've seen the sticks in your grows lol

twentyeight.threefive said:

We've seen the sticks in your grows lol

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I have this massive oak tree that drops these tiny sticks, if that had worked i would be in hogs heaven

If you dump the peat back into the earth, it all evens out. Learn how to grow guilt free with peat.

I’m going to try and recycle some of my peat, it all depends on how much it breaks down. it might not be 100% peat anymore if I compost the roots in it all together.

Milky Weed said:

I’m going to try and recycle some of my peat, it all depends on how much it breaks down. it might not be 100% peat anymore if I compost the roots in it all together.

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I think it breaks down slower than coco from observations. When i would dump after a coco that stuff was decimated, but my peat fibers in my soil at remix seems to hang in there a little longer.

twentyeight.threefive said:

It was a rhetorical question...

The effort of trying to recover coco from a massive rootball isn't worth my time.

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Come on guys. Its just a substrate for the love of peat

"Canadian peat industry's agenda.Over this period, the volume of harvested peat increased by 45 percent while the harvested peatland surface areas only increased by 25 percent which is still less than 0.02 per-cent of the total peatland area in Canada. Furthermore,some 500 hectares of worked surfaces are being restored."

Pine needles works btw, DTW, but you gotta have them chopped up to this precise dimension. I stopped playing with that nonsense when i found out about humus. Yeah rotted trees is an option too. Go find one that breaks up in ur hand...thats gold

hotrodharley said:

Okay. Just wondering. In case other readers don't know perlite is a manufactured product using a lot of energy.

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Also the carbon footprint on shipping something that's light with a high volume is quite large.


I wish there was a better alternative to peat for a lot of things, especially in a regulated space where you get tested for mold/mildew etc because a lot of the good options carry a higher risk of you failing those tests like leaf mold/duff. Pittmoss is alright, but you still need another medium to use with it imo, it just holds too much water in comparison, but at like 10% of your mix is fine. Which basically leaves Coco as the "best" but I'd imagine the carbon footprint to get that to where I live (the Midwest) is pretty huge still.

I think the ultimate goal should be to eliminate as much peat/perlite/etc use as possible and replace it with other suitable media, use as much local material as possible and to reuse whatever peat or soil you have as long as possible or repurpose it afterwards. I for a long time have been curious to go to the back of my parents property and dig up a couple 5 gallon buckets from a fertile area and then use that instead of peat in my mix and see how it goes, I've just never gotten around to it because I always find something else to try to dial in every harvest.

Things like pittmoss and biochar are great and there are a ton of new greener options coming around now. It's important to do your research and know how they will interact with your soil and nutrients though before you just mix it up willy nilly based on what someone tells you. Read about how they will affect the c:n balance of your soil and compare how they hold moisture or provide room for microbes or give aeration etc.

Again right now if you can't switch to something more sustainable or eco friendly you can massively reduce your impact by just reusing your soil and perlite/lava rock/pumice etc. The amount of carbon released shipping these things is just as bad as the impact of them being mined or produced a lot of the time.

Hydro for the win!

mudballs said:

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Is this turning into a dog thread?

Giraffes work too, we dont discriminate

MAPITO is all the rage