Sphagnum Farming UK - A Sustainable Alternative to Peat in Growing Media

该项目旨在建立一种大规模种植泥炭苔藓的方法，为园艺提供可持续的泥炭替代品。天然泥炭预计将在20年内耗尽，而采伐对环境造成了巨大的危害。商业规模的泥炭种植提供了一个快速、有效和可持续的解决方案，以满足市场对园艺生长介质的需求，因为泥炭只是古老的保存的泥炭。这是一种创新的方法，因为藻很难繁殖，而且生长速度相对较慢。然而，我们的繁殖方法已经表明，我们可以成功地大规模种植，现在我们希望确定最佳的泥炭菌株和生长条件，以创造一个更大规模的产品，可用于田间种植作物，并为土地所有者/农民创造经济作物，以生长介质的形式取代泥炭，同时保留湿地和泥炭形成条件。

This project seeks to establish a method for growing Sphagnum moss on a large scale to provide asustainable alternative to peat in horticulture. Natural peat is expected to run out within 2 decades, andharvesting is causing great harm to the environment. Sphagnum grown on a commercial scale offers anfast, effective and sustainable solution to this market need for horticultural growing media because peatis merely old preserved Sphagnum. This is an innovative approach, as Sphagnum is difficult topropagate, and is relatively slow growing. However, our propagation methods have shown that we canmass-cultivate successfully and we now wish to determine optimum Sphagnum strains and growingconditions to create a much larger scale product which can be used to cultivate a crop at field scale andgenerate a cash crop for landowners/farmers in the form of a growing medium to replace peat whilstrestoring wetland and peat-forming conditions.