It’s that time of year again. The snow is retreating and young buds swell with the promise of new growth. The muskegs are still frozen and travel is easy in a landscape that seems to consist of more water than land.
I step from hummock to frozen hummock, barely leaving a track. In summer, I would sink knee-deep here, my rubber boots filling with ice-cold bog water. Labrador tea brushes against my leg as I follow caribou tracks deeper into the bog. I bend down to pick bog berries sweetened under a blanket of snow. A startled grouse bursts into flight as I walk among lichen-covered spruce, wondering how much older those gnarly trees are than my own short human-years.
Spring is also the time to start my garden seedlings for a new growing season. Living in the northern part of the province, gardening can be somewhat of a challenge. The winter hangs on a little longer up here, the first frosts come a little earlier. The biggest challenge is to find good soil. For years, I did not think twice when I went to the local garden centre and picked up a bag of potting mix to start my seedlings. Sure, I knew potting mixes contain peat, but that wasn’t a bad thing, or was it?
Peatlands are wetlands that differ from marshes or swamps because of the peat which has formed over thousands of years. They have many names – bogs, fens, mires, moors to name just a few. The name muskeg derives from the Cree word maskīk or maskihkok, the place of swampy grass.
“The muskegs are the kidneys of Mother Earth,” friend and Knowledge Keeper Eleanor Hegland always told me. “It’s a very powerful place.”
Peat is made up of dead or very slowly decomposing sphagnum mosses, sedges and other wetland plants. On top of this layer grow mosses, lichens, sedges, flowers, carnivorous plants, shrubs and even trees such as tamarack and black spruce. This living layer will turn into peat at a pace of about 1 mm of growth per year. Most peatlands have been slowly building up in this way since the end of the last ice age, roughly 12,000 years ago. But how does this peat get into my potting mix?
Photo by Miriam Korner
I never made the connection between the muskeg I love and the peat in my potting mix until a peat company announced its intention to mine peat right here in Northern Saskatchewan, in the very muskeg I love to roam. In order to mine peat, muskegs have to be drained and dried, stripped of vegetation, vacuum harvested inch by inch, year by year, layer by layer – thousand-year old peat processed and shipped to garden centers. Suddenly, I felt sick about the peat in my potting mix. Where had it come from? And what happens when peat is taken out of the muskeg?
I turn to Eleanor, whose knowledge comes from “the old ones” and from being on the land. I follow her through the muskeg as she picks Labrador tea and other medicines. “The muskegs have so many plants, the old people talk about them, but I haven’t found them yet – not all of them anyway,” she says. I reach down through the sphagnum moss, pull up a handful of a soggy brown substance. It smells like forest after rain. In my hand, I’m holding peat.
Being with Eleanor, I feel like a child. “Can I drink this?” I ask dipping my cup into the cool muskeg water. “Yes, it’s good medicine,” Eleanor replies, “especially in spring when new life is coming. The old people sent us to get that fresh water to make tea, it’s like an energy drink.”
The muskeg is cool and wet despite the fact that we are facing one of the worst fire seasons in decades. It’s only May, but the sun is a glowing red ball behind a veil of smoke, and pyro clouds pop up around us spreading fire instead of rain.
Walking through the muskeg in summer is like walking on a giant sponge. In fact, muskegs do act like sponges. They hold water in wet conditions and release it in dry conditions, thus regulating water in times of flood and draught. That’s why Eleanor calls them kidneys – the peatland’s plant tissue absorbs pollutants and filters water, if it is kept wet. Drained or dried peatlands ignite easily, burn for days or weeks, even smoulder underground, releasing 15 times more mercury into the atmosphere than forest fires do.
I felt sick about the peat in my potting mix. Where had it come from? What happens when peat is taken out of the muskeg?
One fall day, when the muskegs have turned golden red, I stumble upon frog pants – so-called as a translation of the Cree name, athikacas. The plant’s fly-trapping red-green leaves, formed like a pitcher, hold tiny pools of water, hovered over by purple flowers, heads bent like lampposts. The pitcher plants stand in a protective circle, a small secret community in the depth of the muskeg. When I retreat, my love for the muskeg has deepened, quietly, without words. “The muskegs are a place of belonging, they comfort you, ground you,” Eleanor says. A sickening feeling of emptiness takes hold when I imagine it all to be gone.
Muskegs are complex and fascinating ecosystems, home to many plant and animal species. Woodland caribou choose muskegs as their calving grounds and rely on the lichens and mineral-rich water found there. Moose, deer, black bears, wolves, and lynx are also frequently found in northern Saskatchewan muskegs amongst millions of songbirds, raptors, and waterfowl.
“Saskatchewan muskegs stand out as a staging area for the whooping crane, one of the most endangered birds in the world,” explains Edward Struzik, who cares so deeply about muskegs that he wrote a book about them. Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat is a treasure for everything muskeg.
Muskeg and us: a reciprocal relationship
“How would you define a muskeg?” I ask Eleanor. “It’s a spiritual living entity,” she says without hesitation. “Muskegs are so powerful. If we don’t have muskegs, what happens to our lakes and rivers?”
In Eleanor’s worldview, muskegs are best left alone. That’s not how western industry sees it. Struzik explains: “Historically we viewed peatlands as wastelands that needed to be drained to make way for cities, farms, forest plantations, and mosquito control. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, the National Research Council held annual meetings to address the issues of the ‘muskeg problem.’ […] We’ve come a long way since then, but not far enough.”
“If you don’t respect the land, it’s going to retaliate,” says Eleanor. I hear grief and anger in her voice, but most of all I hear love – love for a place she’s scared to lose. And she’s not the only one.
Peatlands are gaining worldwide attention as natural climate solutions. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), peatlands are the largest carbon store on earth, sequestering 0.37 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year. Peat soils contain more than 600 gigatonnes of carbon – more than all the other vegetation on earth combined. Instead of releasing carbon into the atmosphere – which will happen as plant matter decomposes – peat stores it.
But what happens to the carbon that is stored in the peat once it is in my potting mix? Elizabeth Bekolay, a naturalist and ecological educator who is growing plants peat-free, enlightens me: “Once added to the soil, the carbon that was stored in the peat for thousands of years is slowly released back into the atmosphere, increasing every gardener’s carbon footprint significantly.”
If you want to slow or stop wildfires which are burning bigger and hotter, you need bogs and fens to slow them down. And if you want to mitigate flooding you need mossy peatlands to absorb the moisture.
Why then do we use peat? Bekolay tells me it’s to increase the amount of water and air that the soil can hold. However, she says, “Peat only works in tandem with fertilizers because it has little nutrient of its own. I find that a peat-heavy potting soil mix actually requires more watering than other media, like compost.”
While the UK is phasing out peat products, it is difficult in Saskatchewan to find a potting mix that doesn’t contain peat. What are the alternatives? “You can order potting soil mixes online from other places or you mix your own,” says Bekolay. “The best way to start is to research ‘peat-free potting soil mixes.’ The mix I have had the best luck with, for my vegetable starts, is half coconut coir and half vermicompost. You can buy both of those growing media at most garden centers. My tomatoes were beautiful!”
It takes a bit more time and effort, but as Eleanor says, we need to protect Mother Earth, and gardening peat-free might be a small price to pay. “If you take care of the land, the land will take care of you,” says Eleanor – or in Edward’s words:
“If you want to pick wild blueberries, cloudberries, and cranberries, find extremely rare moths, butterflies, and carnivorous orchids, see endangered woodland caribou taking refuge from wolves and wildfires, you’ll need to venture into a peatland ecosystem. If you want to slow or stop wildfires which are burning bigger and hotter, you need bogs and fens to slow them down. And if you want to mitigate flooding you need mossy peatlands to absorb the moisture.”
A year later, my own seedlings are growing in local soil and compost, fertilized by leaf tea – no peat! – and I set out once again into the muskeg. There’s lots I learned in this one year about respect, reciprocity, and love for the land. Most importantly I have learned how little I know.
Miriam Körner is an award-winning writer and illustrator and a founding member of For Peat’s Sake — Protecting Northern Saskatchewan Muskegs, a grassroots organization that builds connections between people and muskegs and fights against new peat mining projects in northern Saskatchewan.
