My last post "Should people stop using peat moss?"came as a result of a post by Ken Druse at Garden Rant. The argument is that by buying peat moss you are encouraging the depletion of peat bogs in Canada, where peat moss is harvested. Some alternatives to peat moss might be home made compost or coir, a fiber from coconut production. What I find interesting is peat moss is organic, yet because it is harvested from peat bogs it's bad. Same could be said for coir, which is the result of the coconut production on the other side of the world. The point that "most of our peat is shipped hundreds of miles, often when it’s wet and heavy, which adds further to the fuel required for shipping", could easily apply to coir. Sure coir is lighter, but it's shipped thousands of miles! I realized a few years ago that the use of organics is a very personal thing and subject to the users interpretation. We had a customer looking for organics and when shown the blood meal or bone meal said she could not use them in her garden because she was a vegan! No animal byproducts in her garden. What we thought of as safe, organic fertilizers we're to her anything but.
As gardeners with blogs, or gardeners that read blogs, this stuff is interesting and important. Outside our world, the general public must be really confused. You can imagine the angst that some people go through in trying to grow something. Over at Gardenpunks, Katie goes through some of this angst when trying to decide weather buying ladybugs is ecologically the right thing to do. We had this argument a couple of years ago at Gardening Tips n Ideas. She has a good answer for those confused as to which way to proceed. Katie say's, " So folks, make the decisions that are best for you AND mindful for the environment simultaneously. Don't let the tsunami of available information on both sides of every decision/subject paralyze you from making necessary decisions. You’ll never please everyone all the time." Fantastic advice.