Why didn’t we think of it sooner?
The makers of SylvaGrow professional-quality peat-free compost – which has bagged no less than three Which? Gardening Best Buy awards, and carries the endorsement of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) – have just dropped a very powerful and persuasive tool right into the trugs and wheelbarrows of gardeners up and down the land: an A4-size piece of paper:
CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO GO TO SYLVAGROW’S WEBSITE WHERE YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE FLYER
*The downloadable version has an ink-saving white background*
This flyer is available to download from SylvaGrow’s website, as a PDF file here. You can print out a copy to take along to your local independent garden centre or shop, plant nursery, farm or hardware store, or any other stockist of horticultural supplies.
The idea behind the flyer is that it will help supercharge your peat-free pester power. It let’s a potential stockist know of SylvaGrow’s recent Best Buy awards and its stamp of approval from the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), and it gives the retailer detail of pack sizes, why they might like to stock SylvaGrow composts (and other products) for you to buy, and contact details for prices and samples. It also carries arguably the most important message of all:
How to employ some positive, peat-free pester power
Here are just some of the ways I’ve come up with for using SylvaGrow’s flyer.
If you can think of others, email john@earthfriendlygardener.net and I’ll add them to the list.
• Print it out and take it along to your local garden centre or other stockist of gardening supplies and ask if they’ll consider stocking SylvaGrow. Explain that you want to grow your plants using a modern peat-free compost, and that if they stock one, you will buy it.
The flyer is a great ice-breaker to open up a ‘compost conversation’; it’s clear that many small and medium-sized businesses are unaware of the range of modern and reliable peat-free composts that now exist, and some haven’t even heard of SylvaGrow (even though they might actually be selling peat-free plants grown in its professional cousin, Sylvamix).
• Post or email the flyer to your local garden centre or other seller of gardening supplies. Ask them if they’ll consider stocking it for you. If you don’t get a reply, keep trying. If that fails ring them up and ask ‘did you get my information about SylvaGrow peat-free compost?’
Peat-free gardener, hedgehog saviour and Twitter user @HedgehogTorfaen did just that (see right). She engaged her local garden centre manager in a chat about SylvaGrow, about peat-free compost in general, and is even planning to take some peat-free grown plants in to show him.
• Give a copy to your gardening relatives and friends and ask them to pester their local garden centre or nursery for SylvaGrow.
• Contact your local nursery or garden centre using social media, such as Facebook or Twitter. Many businesses now use social media to keep in touch with their loyal customers (as well as find new ones), so search online for your nearest one, and strike up a peat-free conversation. My Twitter username is @earthFgardener
• Post or email a copy to the host of your local radio gardening programme. It’s clear that some of our gardening ‘experts’ are quite out of touch – by accident or design – with the advances in modern peat-free composts. News about SylvaGrow ought to create a topical talking point for a gardening show, which all modern, nature-savvy gardeners – whatever their age or gardening interests – will find informative.
If you don’t have any luck, and you still hear ‘must have peat’ or references to an illusory ‘anti-peat movement’, try phoning in live on air and challenging the ‘experts’. It’s time to bust these myths, and it’s down to gardeners to do the bulk of the busting.
The power of sharing peat-free success
Social media is proving to be a gentle yet powerful tool in letting more and more gardeners know about just how good modern, 21st century peat-free composts are – in contrast to the outdated and often misleading information still found in many gardening magazines.
Check out the hashtag ‘#peatfree’ on Twitter.
By talking, sharing tips, ideas, pictures and by encouraging each other to up our peat-free pester power, social media is changing the way we all garden, by slaying outdated ‘must have peat’ myths and by being a positive, disruptive force for good. Listen carefully, and you’ll hear threatened peatlands everywhere cheering you on…
If you’re still not convinced, check out the ‘#peatfree’ hashtag on Twitter to see the results both gardeners and our top horticultural professionals are getting with modern peat-free mixes.
We need a gardener-to-gardener flyer, too
SylvaGrow’s flyer about its Best Buy composts is a significant first step in helping to replace those heaps of nature-wrecking, non-renewable peat we all see in garden retailers, with sustainable and renewable, peat-free composts. What we need now from the makers of all modern peat-frees is a flyer we can give to our gardening relatives and friends, one we can slide under shed doors down on the allotment, and give out at the next meeting of our garden club or horticultural society. You might, of course, fancy making your own.
Either way, gardener’s are here and ready to help spread the word.
Other modern and reliable peat-free composts are available – let us earth-friendly gardeners help you compost-makers to spread the word
If you’re a maker of modern peat-free compost, it could be your name wherever you see ‘SylvaGrow’ above. Us nature-savvy gardeners, who quite like the idea that our gardens should give more than they take from the natural world, are here and ready to help.
We are your team of peat-free pesterers, so bring on those flyers.
More on going peat-free in your garden or allotment…
• For tips on peat-free sowing, potting and growing see How to Succeed in Your Garden With Modern, Reliable and Nature-friendly Peat-free Compost.
• See what other peat-free gardeners and commercial growers (yes, there are flourishing peat-free businesses out there) are up to, and share your own peat-free experiences by joining Twitter and tagging tweets from your balcony, garden or allotment with the hashtag ‘#peatfree’. Nature’s loving it.
• Check out my articles and posts about all things peat-free here.
