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Re: Peat Moss

Hampton Gardener: Boy when you are wrong (anhd insulting) you are wrong--and insulting! I, and many American gardeners like me, compost and mix out own soil AND there is no peat anywhere in our collective acres of garden. Also, it was not peat that was used for staunching wounds in WWI and rarely in WW2 (you are mixing the milkweed pods collected to make rescue vests for the navy with the moss), by the Amerindians for thousands of years but fresh sphagnum moss. There was an English cottage industry (I vaguely remember a film about it, too), that collected sphagnum moss, dried it, and shipped it to the front. There was no need to sterilize it as sphagnum moss is free of bacteria (should be a drug company looking into that). Before you write, do your research! Peter
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2003 5:08 PM
Subject: [GWL] Peat Moss

I watching all this banter on peat moss as well as the level of knowledge of garden writers in general.  There seems to be a relationship in these two threads.  Have you forgotten that virtually all of the commercially available potting soils and mixes are peat based?  I'm not speaking to the virtue of peat and peat harvesting...just the ignorance of some who insist that they never use peat.  And by the way...long before Canadian peat became the basis of such mixes like the original Cornell peat-lite mixes of 25 years ago...The Germans had the market cornered and the best peat in the world probably still exists in Germany.  Peat is also harvested in the Southeast U.S., in Michigan and other areas of the U.S.  In World War I and II it was commonly used as a sterile dressing for wounds.  As it's become more and more expensive as a constituent of potting mixes it has been replaced by composted bark mixes, coir, rubber, various foam particles.  Do you work guys.  You gonna write...do your research first.

Andrew Messinger
The Hampton Gardener
The Hampton Gardener is a Registered Trade Mark
(Published every Thursday in the Southampton Press)



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