In vegetable gardening, peat moss has always been the real deal when it comes to growing plants that are acid-loving. These plants are said to be “ericaceous” because they belong to the family Ericaceae”.
With peat moss, vegetable garden is sterile, preventing unnecessary growth of weed seeds and other disease causing organisms that could render the efforts of a gardener useless.
Gardeners loved peat moss and they mainly loved it because it forms an important part of a potting soil and seed start, and because of its natural ability to amend soil.
Should You Use Peat Moss In Raised Garden Beds?
In your usage of peat moss in raising garden beds, efforts must be made to make use of the best quality of peat moss available.
You can determine the quality of peat moss using two separate parameters; the dust content and the fiber length.
Recommendation demands that you use a high fiber content that has long strands of peat fiber.
Peat moss that has larger fibers will take a very longer time before it got broken down in your soil, thereby improving the porosity level of your soil.
More so, peat moss with dust like texture is not recommended. Thus, you can use peat moss in raising your garden beds because it will surely enhance its water holding capacity, as well as the addition of structure to your garden beds.
It provides a form of passage that the roots of your plants can access as at when needed even as it holds water.
Read also: 5 Types Of Plants That Like Peat Moss
Of What Benefit Is Peat Moss to Your Vegetable Garden?
Prior to knowing how to use peat moss on your vegetable garden, you need to know why it’s useful to use it for your vegetable garden, and some of these benefit include;
the ability of peat moss to help your vegetable garden soil retain much water, the provision of a sterile environment which is suitable for planting and growing your vegetable plants,
as well as the provision of an acidic environment for your vegetable plants that will only thrive best in an acidic medium. To be concise, it is used as an additive and seed start up medium in your vegetable garden, coupled with its good absorbent property.
Read also: How Much Peat Moss to Add to Soil?
How to Use Peat Moss on Vegetable Garden?
Using peat moss is one good and natural way to condition your soil especially on a vegetable garden.
One thing you must know is that you cannot use peat moss as lone or single material on your vegetation garden.
For you to get your best results, you must have a way or technical knowhow of using peat moss in mixture with other ingredients so as to get your desire growth that is specific to your vegetables.
To use peat moss on vegetable garden with containers, pots and raised beds, you can use between one- third to two-third of peat moss mixed with either compost or potting soil.
More so, to use peat moss on a plain or spread vegetable garden, you can carry out the application of peat moss by applying it in a two to three inch layer and then introducing it in a form of mixture into about 12 inches of the topmost layer of your vegetable garden soil.
Lastly, to use peat moss on your vegetable garden for starting seeds, you can mix the peat moss in a 50:50 ratio with perlite.
In other way round, you can also use peat moss by mixing one third of it with one third of perlite, as well as one third of a soilless mix like pine bark.
However, on your vegetable garden, avoid too much of peat moss so that your soil won’t become too acidic. In the face of much acidic condition, you can as well add lime.
To improve the organic content and water holding capacity of your garden soil so as to grow everyday vegetables in your garden, peat moss remain very beneficial in helping you achieve your aim with other alternatives like rice hulls and coconut fiber (Coir) which can be choices that are more environmentally friendly.
