Why we Make our Own Soil

    If you don’t know, potting soil is incredibly expensive when you combine it with the cost of fertilizer. So we attempt to knock out two birds with one stone. At the Green Pantry Project, we strive to find innovative ways to cut environmentally damaging gardening methods and costly and inefficient methods. Val already had an interesting way of creating soil. The church takes perlite and mixes it with peat moss and compost. Peat moss is a soil amendment that comes from Canada. It lasts several years but also takes a very long time to grow. It’s used as a fertilizer because it can manage water and hold onto nutrients that would otherwise leach out of our soil. It improves the texture and consistency of soil. Learn more here.

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    Recently, Peat moss has been incredibly controversial as scientists discovered that it’s not as eco-friendly as we believed it was. In fact, the UK government has stated that it plans to ban Peat moss by 2024. So why is Peat moss bad? Peatlands contain five times more carbon than forests, and disturbing peat for agriculture or harvesting it for compost releases CO₂ to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change according to The Conversation. The easiest substitute for this is compost (read more in our “The Taste of Compost: Made Nutritious with Microorganisms” installment), but compost doesn’t completely fulfill the needs of the more acidic plants. The Green Pantry Project will move away from Peat moss in the 2022 season and develop better alternatives. Be on the lookout for what our 2022 soil looks like!