Clippings
Garden centres struggle under peat-free pressure
Garden centres are warning that making customers go ‘cold turkey’ by switching to selling only peat-free composts may put them off gardening altogether.
The government is now considering a ban on peat sales after the gardening industry missed its deadline to eliminate peat from amateur gardening by this year. Only about one in ten bags of compost sold is completely peat-free, and though most garden centres stock reduced-peat potting composts, no major chain has stopped selling peat altogether.
“Only about one in ten bags of compost sold is totally peat-free”
Garden Centre Association new chair, Mike Burks, says customers must be “weaned off”. He believes the low demand for it is a hangover from a decade ago, when peat-free composts were poor quality. “We went in the wrong direction to begin with,” he says. But his West Country-based Gardens Group centres are backing #PeatFreeApril – an awareness-raising social media campaign running all month – and he reports that sales of Melcourt’s SylvaGrow peat-free compost have tripled this spring.
