Great to host a visit from our friends at The Manchester Metropolitan University, to catch up with Chris Field, Fraser Baker & Bidhya Sharma. We are collaborating on the Horizon Palus Demos Project, in which we are scaling up Sphagnum Farming for use as a peat free alternative in horticulture. We’re looking forward to sharing results soon!
We’re celebrating World Wetlands Day today by shining the spotlight on our favourite type of wetland – peatlands. They provide crucial ecoservices such as promoting biodiversity, carbon storing and sequestration, flood and wildfire control, and water filtration to name a few.
Sphagnum moss, the dominant peat former, can store huge quantities of water in its cells, and can hold up to 20x its own weight in water. Re-wetting damaged peatlands and reintroducing Sphagnum is key to preventing further CO2 emissions being lost from exposed peat and to help restore peatlands to carbon-sequestering sinks.
Kinder Scout was first planted with Sphagnum over a decade ago. Thanks to the hard work of Moors for the Future Partnership, the National Trust and many dedicated volunteers, Kinder has become a valuable demonstrator site for the benefits of upland peatland restoration. Before these interventions, the site was a net emitter of CO₂e.
Today, with millions of our BeadaHumok® Sphagnum moss plugs planted on Kinder Scout to accelerate Sphagnum establishment, it is sequestering carbon, supporting richer biodiversity, and delivering improved water management across the landscape.
We’re proud to play a part in such a transformational project:
We’re delighted that ‘The most important plant in the world’ by Caroline Vitzthum has been selected for the 2025 Frome International Climate Film Festival and has recently been screened at the Little Tree Cinema in Frome. It is also currently showing in LIMBO, a group exhibition on peatlands as terrains in flux at De Proef. (Drenthe, NL). The exhibition is initiated by RE-PEAT, and the film showing will run until 7th December. You can find out more here: https://www.iucn-uk-peatlandprogramme.org/news/re-peat-presents-limbo-collective-exhibition-peatlands-terrains-flux
The film, commissioned by IUCN UK Peatland Programme, focuses on a collaboration between Moors for the Future Partnership and BeadaMoss to reintroduce Sphagnum moss to a peatland site in the Peak District.
It first premiered at the IUCN UK Peatland Programme’s Peatlands, People, and Nature conference in Aviemore in September 2024.
The link to the full film can be found below – we would highly recommend giving it a watch!
For more information regarding our BeadaHumok and our Sphagnum restoration work, please see the link below: https://beadamoss.com/peatland-restoration-our-work/
The BeadaMoss team are hard at work fulfilling partner orders as the peatland planting season gets underway. This time of year marks the ramp-up of restoration activity across the UK’s moorlands. One of our vans can carry around 90,000 individual BeadaHumok® sphagnum plugs, these are all bound for restoration projects across the Peaks.
Hopefully the weather holds and the contractors can make the most of the planting window!