2 x Bags of Dalefoot Wool Compost peat-Free, Sustainable: 30 litres

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This Peat Free April, award-winning, environmental journalist and co-author of The Climate Change Garden book, Kim Stoddart gets excited about some of the tips and topics she will be sharing with us over the months ahead:

No dig also reduces weeds because you’re not bringing up annual weed seeds by digging. It doesn’t mean no weeds, you still need to hoe and trowel out any weeds that blow on and germinate, but there are significantly fewer. It’s important too to ensure that weeds don’t try to sneak in from grassy paths and edges. I have creeping buttercups here in my garden which keep trying to colonise the veg beds by stealth so I regularly weed the edges. These hyphae are usually invisible to the human eye unless they are in very high concentrations. Every so often, I squeal with delight as I open up a bag of compost to find a delicate white coating. Millions of fungal strands form a lace and assure me that my compost is healthy and full of microscopic life.Whilst worms are moving up and down through the layers of the soil, they open spaces called pores. The action of worms along with the action of bacteria and fungi creates soil with lots of pores. These are spaces through which air and water can travel into the soil, making the soil well-drained: Following the Peat Free April movement on social media for more information on why peat is such an incredible resource, and what we can do to preserve it. Stephanie Hafferty is an award winning garden and food writer, expert no dig gardener, homesteader, edible garden designer and inspirational public speaker. Stephanie is currently creating a no dig homestead on half an acre in West Wales, from where she runs gardening courses. Her garden was featured on BBC Gardeners’ World in 2022. It is no longer gardening as usual but there are lots of solutions to be found from the natural world and there is plenty of hope. I will be sharing tips every month here on everything to do with building and boosting soil health, natural pest control, seed saving, water and money saving and much more besides.

The GIMA (Garden Industry Manufacturer’s Association) judges described Dalefoot as, “a company that has sustainability and the environment at the very heart of what it does. As well as delivering a great peat-free product, its peatland restoration work makes Dalefoot a worthy winner of this inaugural Sustainability Award”. Simon Bland Director at Dalefoot Composts, who runs the company with Professor Jane Barker, said: “We are absolutely delighted to have been shortlisted for this prestigious award, particularly given how testing the year has been for everyone. We’ve been so proud of how our small team has stepped up to the challenge over recent months, managing a huge uplift in sales, maintaining quality production standards and signing up lots of new customers, whilst often working remotely from home.Reach out with little acts of kindness where you can; a warm hello, a compliment to someone who is looking sad… it offers hope for a more resilient future for us all, together. The problem for peat is that it comes out of the ground very easily and requires very little in the way of processing. It is clean and rich in organic matter, making it very easy to bag up and sell. Some large horticultural companies own vast swathes of peat bogs, which they drain and extract, simply scraping it out of the ground with diggers. Turning even some waste items into useful resources for the garden saves money and helps reduce our reliance on buying everything in. Be it compost making, seed saving, mulch making, it is all part of the low cost, self-empowering solution. Ecosystems and the earth as a whole, (as the first name suggests) are systems. In her book “Thinking in Systems” Donnella Meadows describes a system as “a set of things, people, cells, molecules or whatever interconnected in such a way, that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time”. Each of the species and organisms within a system contribute towards how the system can behave and regulate itself, both on a local and global scale. The more biodiversity we have the more likely that our ecosystems and therefore our planet will be in balance. This means that they will be more resilient to disturbances and natural disasters, and able to adapt to change. The more we degrade the system by losing these species, the less resilient it becomes. We can already see this with climate change and the loss of our natural carbon sinks such as woodlands and peat bogs making the earth less resilient to the change in our fossil fuel use. These beds were made with 5cm of compost (after the dance!) on top of the card, on top of the weedy lawn. During 2021 I harvested so many things, including carrots, parsnips, squash, sweetcorn, cabbages, kale and leeks.

Healthy soil is crucial for a healthy planet, and growing using no dig gardening methods is a key way that we can help to create and maintain a vibrant soil ecosystem. Soil is the largest sequester of carbon on the planet. Digging releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so one of the simplest ways we can all help to reduce climate change is to stop digging. A mulch around the outside of water hungry plants can keep moisture in for longer. A thin sprinkling of compost, comfrey, grass clippings, woodchip, sheep wool or leafmould works well Professor Jane Barker of Dalefoot Composts said: “Comfrey is a truly remarkable plant offering a multitude of uses and we’re excited to grow it right here on the farm for our compost. We’ll be looking at how we can use it in other products for the gardener in the future. Sheep ‘dags’ form a protective layer over the soil and are ideal for established plants. ‘Dags’ are the soiled parts of the fleece which are otherwise discarded after shearing.

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We have seen more and more extreme weather events in the last 10-20 years as a result of climate change. In the UK this often presents itself as very high rainfall. When coupled with the draining and depletion of peatlands, the result is catastrophic flooding, which has a very real impact on those living in these areas.