Our Peat Free Trials - Spring update

So this is a Salanova winter lettuce and like most lettuces it was started in about 10 cubic centimeters of a growing medium. Normally that medium is mostly peat. Peat is just wonderful at holding the moisture and giving a good stable environment for the seed to root in both physically and in terms of the nutrition that it provides as well. But it's problematic. It's a bit like coal, it's been buried in the ground for tens of thousands of years and we're kind of mining it to grow food for people. But it is contributing towards climate change, we can't deny it. It's been proven now that it's perfectly possible to grow pretty much everything without any peat at all. There are some quite tricky areas finding a proper peat-free mix that's going to hold together for very small vegetable blocks. This has been one of the barriers actually that has stood in the way of everybody going peat-free. When you've found that recipe and you can scale it up, it's a game changer for every single farm in the country and means that that problem is solved. For almost two years we've been carrying out some research which aims to find a peat-free growing medium for lettuce like this and what we have in this polytunnel are three different treatments of lettuce growing in different mediums. On my left we've got some lettuce that is grown in peat and on my right we've got some lettuce that isn't grown in peat. At the moment as you can see they're looking quite similar in size. Overall this is looking really promising at the moment. It shows that our hard work is moving us in the right direction. The previous government promised to bring in a ban on peat sales by the end of 2024. That did not happen. While there is no legislation, people are still digging up peat bogs. Hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide are being released into the air so that's it's also destroying a really important biodiverse habitat. We do need to actually push this legislation through and just ban peat and then farmers will find a solution. Quite frankly they've been given long enough and most of them have done absolutely sweet F.A. Were it to be banned, solutions would be found very very quickly. I mean otherwise farmers will always just look to whatever is cheapest. Obviously they will, they're paid so little for their food they have to in most cases. So with the rest of the team that have been working on this project, so that includes Coventry University, Delftland Nurseries and Cambridge Eco, we have now successfully created a peat-free medium that we can grow lettuce in. However it needs a little bit more development and we need to look at scaling it up. So fingers crossed we can get some funding to take the project forward so that in the future Delftland Nurseries can buy peat-free blocking medium and then we can buy the seedlings off of Delftland to grow our own peat-free lettuce.