Dalefoot Composts teams up with the Eden Project to promote super-sustainable gardening

Dalefoot Composts is joining forces with the Eden Project to encourage Britain’s gardeners to embrace super-sustainable gardening and switch to using its ‘climate positive’ peat-free compost in their outdoor spaces, window boxes and allotments.

The leading UK peat-free compost maker has formed a new partnership with the Eden Project to inspire more people to move away from using environmentally-damaging peat in their gardens to the most sustainable peat-free alternative made from British ingredients.

Dalefoot’s unique range of composts boasts materials grown on the farm using carbon-storing crops, making them climate positive.

The company’s Wool Compost for Potting is now endorsed by the Eden Project and will include its logo on each bag. Dalefoot is planning other joint initiatives with the world-renowned environmental charity and social enterprise over the coming years.

With sustainability at its heart, Dalefoot harvests bracken from the Lakeland fells, and other sites of conservation across the country, blends this with wool from native hill sheep and then adds comfrey, grown on its farm, to make sustainable, climate positive and peat-free composts. This unique mix of fully-traceable, fertilising ingredients provides slow-release nutrition for plants, so no need to feed, whilst also reducing the need to water.

Dalefoot’s entire range is approved for organic gardening by the Soil Association and its Wool Compost products were shortlisted for the first ever RHS Chelsea Sustainable Garden Product of the Year 2021. And as Living Wage Accredited, Dalefoot is further embracing the true definition of sustainability.

Six* show gardens at this week’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show are being supported with Dalefoot’s peat-free composts – the RHS COP26 Garden by Balston Agius, three Container Gardens and two Balcony Gardens.

Professor Jane Barker of Dalefoot Composts said: “Climate change is now a pressing issue for us all and it’s reassuring to see so many people now gardening in a more sustainable way. Here at Dalefoot we are able to deliver climate-friendly composts that enable the UK’s gardeners to reduce their own carbon footprint – to be climate change, sustainable gardeners. Teaming up with the Eden Project helps us really raise the profile of the environmental benefits of using Dalefoot’s composts and hopefully ensure that more peat remains in the ground rather than in bags in the garden centre.”

With lockdown gardening and news of the Government’s proposed ban of peat compost use by amateur gardeners by 2024, Dalefoot has seen a surge in interest from both mail order and trade customers in its innovative peat-free range. In the last 12 months, the company has doubled compost production and is on target to double it again, each year, over the next five years.

The Dalefoot team also restores peat bogs, some of which were once owned by peat compost companies, across the country for the likes of Natural England, NatureScot, South West Water and wildlife trusts. Peat bogs store more carbon than forests and many in the UK are now in poor condition, releasing carbon rather than just storing it. Dalefoot works with these agencies to help reduce carbon release and return the bogs to functioning, healthy eco-systems.