Boglands are being denuded for peat export

ANOTHER LIFE:THE SPECIAL feeling of Saturday morning has great survival power. Even after long liberation from the five-day week, Saturday still sends me forth uplifted, encouraged, expectant of good things.

Working in the polytunnel, with Lyric FM drowning out the birds (George Hamilton, choosing the music, knows exactly what Saturday’s about), it seemed, therefore, a bit out of key to start feeling guilty. Perched beside my stack of yoghurt pots, saved all winter as modules for seed-sowing, what was I stuffing into them, a dozen at a time? Peatmoss, still. Peatmoss (moss peat, if you prefer) is a beautiful medium for growing, as the Irish Peatland Conservation Council readily agrees.

Soft as velvet, water-absorbent, weed-free, coaxing any seed to spread a filigree of roots, it has been the mainstay of horticulture, amateur and professional, over much of the developed world. It is said that a single cubic metre of extracted peat will eventually release some 50kg of carbon dioxide; this is only a latter-day calculation, to be set beside concern for peatland’s special wildlife and ecosystems.

Sphagnum peat is still a main ingredient in the two-million cubic metres of growing media that Bord na Móna sells annually, mostly to the UK and Western Europe, in the Shamrock-branded products taken over a decade ago by the US multi-national Scott Company. Yet, as part of its “New Contract with Nature”, announced as policy last year, Bord na Móna has joined the Growing Media Initiative, so vigorously promoted by the UK’s Horticultural Trade Association, with government support, and backed by big national DIY stores such as B Q. Bord na Móna’s membership of the GMI commits it to “working towards 90 per cent peat reduction in the UK horticulture retail market”, as urged by Britain’s Biodiversity Action Plan.

Indeed, it hopes to reach 60 per cent reduction in the UK retail compost bags by the end of the year.

It will not be cutting into any new bogs. It has been conserving and restoring for nature some of those still untouched, and helping to create wilderness areas in its oldest cutaways. While diversifying now into other energy initiatives, such as growing algae for biofuel, it is shaving away the last of its great midland peat-plains. As promised on my bags of compost from the co-op (buy two, get one free), the peatmoss in them is “produced as part of an environmental policy which reconciles the need for peat with the need to conserve peatlands which are of scientific interest”. At the same time, its waste composting centre at Kilberry, near Monasterevan in Co Kildare, is the largest of its kind in Ireland. Here, it takes in huge quantities of redundant shrubbery, brown wheely-bin waste, spent brewery barley, sawdust, discarded supermarket fruit and veg, and so on – all great organic stuff – much of it for the Shamrock peat-free sowing and potting compost, on sale at my local co-op at €5.85 for a 75-litre bag. My expert gardening colleague Jane Powers uses a similar New Horizons compost “with added bonemeal, hoof and horn, rock phosphate and vinasse,” sold at her friendly Ecoshop in Greystones, Co Wicklow.

“Vinasse”, I discover, is a waste pulp from the sugar industry (beet or cane) that’s very hard to dispose of without water pollution. Another notable ingredient of “green” sowing and potting composts is coir, the lightweight, fibrous husk peeled from coconuts, which piles up in waste mountains in Sri Lanka. Coir-based compost even comes mixed with waste seed fibre from extracting oil from the neem tree of India and Sri Lanka – this to add neem’s celebrated insecticidal, pest-repellent properties.

How organic and admirable all this seems – until one considers the carbon footprint involved in shipping coir and neem-cake half-way round the world. Bord na Móna may have erased a great share of Ireland’s raised bogs, but its New Contract with Nature and new R D initiatives seems a promising national example of treating all manner of waste as a resource.

At the same time, however, the green NGO, Friends of the Irish Environment, has sent me stark photographs of other commercial excavations for peat, allegedly for export to countries where extraction is illegal and “on a huge scale, with no planning permission or environmental impact assessment”. In smaller extractions, says FIE, turf is being “stripped to the rock, shocking even the locals. Westmeath is very bad”. These times could again be hard on nature, with any sort of enterprise, income or cheap fuel supply being seen as having prior claim. But at least, in growing some of our own food, we can now press our vegetable seeds into yogurt pots filled with eco-friendly compost that, in place of robbing the earth, feeds waste into new life, just as nature does all the time.

Don’t ask me how he got there but there is a wood duck swimming with the mallards on the Erne at Enniskillen.

Gerry Lowe, Saintfield, Co Down

Recently I saw a flock of about 20 waxwings feeding on cotoneaster in Tallaght. Is this as a result of a bad year for rowan berries in their native habitat? Ciara Ní Bheoláin, Tallaght, Dublin 24

Waxwings move west when there is a scarcity of rowan berries in Scandinavia. There are waxwing winters when thousands come to visit.

I am used to the cat bringing in the usual haul of rats, mice, shrews and garden birds. Recently he brought in a bank vole – small ears, short tail, and red-brown back. How much of Ireland have the colonised now?

Gerry Wheeler, Kilfenora, Co Clare

Bank voles have colonised most of the southwest and up as far as Galway.

In recent winters bumblebee workers have often been seen around Dublin; near the coast at Blackrock, Dalkey and Howth. This winter, being much colder, there have been relatively few. I was surprised therefore on February 20th to see a nest with workers exiting and returning with large pollen loads.

Bob Aldwell, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail : viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.