what is Groom & Grow
Groom and Grow uses a mixture of sheep wool and recycled dog fur from Chew-That’s grooming salon to create natural garden pellets meant to help soil’s water retention and nitrogen content. These pellets act the way peat moss would, a common inclusion in soil mixes to retain water in plants. Peat moss, though helpful in gardening, is not a sustainable tool the way wool and fur are and is actually more harmful to the environment when harvested from peatlands. That is why Groom and Grow is a more renewable soil additive with more benefits.
Wool is an absorbent fibre that will allow both water and its own produced nitrogen to slowly seep into the soil of your gardens and for longer periods of time, keeping plants sustained more than other gardening materials that release nitrogen all at once and quickly break down. By combining in the recycled dog fur, these pellets have higher nitrogen levels than sheep wool alone and have the added benefit of pest deterrent. Small creatures will be able to smell the dogs from their fur and, believing there is a dangerous predator nearby, will leave the gardens.
instructions
¼ cup of pellets to 4 cups of potting soil
1kg bag covers 25 square feet of garden space. Sprinkle across the top of the garden and mix into soil before seeding.
Video of seedling
peat moss information
Commonly found in soil mixes, peat moss has been the plant used as a garden additive to help with water and nutrient retention and soil aeration. Because of the wide use of the product, natural production is unable to keep up with the consumer need, making it harmful to the peatlands it comes from.
Peatlands are a wetland ecosystem that produces what we know as peat moss through waterlogging their vegetation and preventing plant material from fully decomposing. That dead organic material is peat. Through accumulating this peat, peatlands are able to store carbon more than any other ecosystem helping to mitigate the effects of climate change as well as minimizing flood risk all over the world, using the water in its carbon storing and organic material making productions. When these peatlands are farmed for peat moss, this carbon turns to CO2 and is released as greenhouse gasses into the environment. Peatland restoration also becomes difficult after farming as the system loses the usable carbon and the soil dries and compacts, sometimes affecting land nearby.
Because of this it is important to use a more sustainable product like the sheep wool and dog fur that makes up Groom and Grow. Unlike peat moss, there is no environmental harm in the collection of these materials making it the less harmful replacement.
