What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. I am joined again and again with

Dr. Bethky, a Soil Scientist consultant for Pitt Moss. So we're back with Dr. Bethky today and what we're going to talk about is actually

Pete Moss. And so I thought maybe Dr. Bethky we could start out by just giving people a brief

overview of what it is in case they don't know and talking

about the potential issues with the sourcing of it and sort of how that brought about this

phase three of potting soil like you mentioned in that very first

episode we did. Well, very good. Yeah, I spent 14 years as technical director for the largest Pete company in the United States some time ago.

And Pete is an organic biological material that has been sequestered or collected in wet areas and the reason

it remains and does not decompose is because it stays so wet that the microbes can't live in it in its native

settings. So it's a big large bog or a big large area where the organic matter that's absorbed, the carbon dioxide that's absorbed by the mosses are then deposited and buried underwater little by little and a lot of the

peat moss bogs actually float on water and then sink little by little and they

create these large deep deposits of organic matter of containing carbon that's been pulled in off the environment.

And they're primarily present in the northern climates and that spagm peat is what we've been using primarily and it's more porous than the Reed sedge or the black peat that's lower down in most of the bogs or in some of the southern climates.

All of it is organic, highly organic in its base and it's made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and very little or no minerals or nutrients.

And of course, the concern there of harvesting the peat moss is that we are taking this carbon that's been

sequestered for years and stored in the soil and in the bog and bringing it up and then putting it in our garden where it decomposes to produce more carbon dioxide and other waste materials.

It's got a big advantage for a lot of greenhouse

growers over garden soil in growing crops because it's clean and free and then they

have to add a lot of nutrients and we figure out the formula

to add the nutrients and the lime adjust it from its acidic environment.

But we also, when you harvest it and use it, then you get the carbon dioxide evolution into the air.

And as a result, that contributes to the CO2.

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