Ep 195. Healing from Hyper-Humus Peat Mining

Mary Stone shares the history and environmental impact of peat mining by Hyper-Humus Inc., learned while attending an outing hosted by the Paulinskill Rivershed Watchers and the Food Shed Alliance in New Jersey.

The Nature Conservancy and New Jersey Fish and Wildlife have received approval to restore the stream's natural sinuosity to improve water quality. Mary encourages using alternatives to peat moss in gardening to support this effort.

 Then she reflects on an analogy of restoring the Hyper-Humus section of the Paulinskill Rivershed and personal growth, encouraging listeners to embrace their own "stretch marks" from life's hardships as badges of wisdom gained.
Thanks for tuning in!

Related Posts and Podcasts you'll enjoy:

Healing from Hyperr-Humus Peat Mining - Blog Post

Ep18. Walking & Plalking, Queens & Bachelors
Weeding Mugwort – Picking up Litter – Blog Post 

Ep 05. NY Botanical Garden, Fall Leaf Confetti
Leaf Mold – Better than Mulch Blog Post

Preservation of the Paulinskill River -  Blog Post
Ep 185. Preservation of the Paulinskill - Overcoming Hardships

Link for more about the Paulinskill Watershed River Watchers: https://paulinskillwatershed.org/

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I'd love to hear your garden and nature stories and your thoughts about topics for future podcast episodes. You can email me at AskMaryStone@gmail.com.

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Mary Stone, Columnist & Garden Designer
                                        AskMaryStone.com

More about the Podcast and Column:

Welcome to Garden Dilemmas, Delights, and Discoveries.

It's not only about gardens; it's about nature's inspirations, about grasping the glories of the world around us, gathering what we learned from mother nature, and carrying these lessons into our garden of life. So, let's jump in in the spirit of learning from each other. We have lots to talk about.

Thanks for tuning in, Mary Stone
Garden Dilemmas? AskMaryStone.com
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Transcript

Ep 195 Healing from Hyper-Humus Peat Mining 

Sat, Feb 22, 2025 2:36PM • 15:32
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
peat mining, hyper humus, peat moss, climate change, wildlife habitat, stream restoration, dissolved oxygen, invasive species, water quality, alternative fertilizers, leaf mold, vermiculite, water chestnut, restoration plan, environmental impact
SPEAKERS
Nature Conservancy Woman, Mary Stone, Ed Samanns, David de Witt

Mary Stone  00:00
Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. I'm Mary Stone, and welcome to garden dilemmas, delights and discoveries. It's not only about gardens. It's about nature's inspirations, about grasping the glories of the world around us, gathering what we learn from mother nature, and carrying these lessons into our garden of life. So let's jump in, in the spirit of learning from each other, we have lots to talk about. 

Mary Stone  00:26
Hello there. It's Mary Stone on the frigid screen porch. Once again, I want to thank those who reached back after our last conversation about salt impact on plants and remedies, with your intention to use less salt and pick up piles of salt left along the roads. If the township doesn't come back to do what they should do and pick up the trash while you're at it. It's called walking and plucking, as we spoke about way back in episode 18. Every little bit we do grows collectively to help restore our waterways and our dear Earth. Which leads to this week's story about restoring the peat mining impact of hyper humus that starts like this.

Mary Stone  01:07
 Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. I enjoyed a walk with a group of folks hosted by the Paulins Kill Rivershed Watchers, in conjunction with the parent organization, the Food Shed Alliance, which is a non profit here in New Jersey, dedicated to helping farmers, feeding people and protecting the environment. Hyper humus is a company that once harvested peat moss, changing the lay of the land along the Paulins Kill River. What a delight to meet Chris Dunbar, the Paulins Kill Watershed Coordinator at the event, along with David DeWitt, a local naturalist who led the discussion along the four mile hike around the Pualins Killand the former site of the plant for hyper humus. The history is fascinating, and as you may know, using peat moss in the horticultural industry and as a source of fuel has lost favor in a big way. 

Mary Stone  02:02
They gave us a timeline as a handout, but David added such dynamics and colorful details to the story. I tried to capture it with my microphone, but the noise of some small planes nearby made it hard to get a good recording. So I'm going to do my best to read bits of what he had said and add some of the color, if I can. The Meadows in the town of Newton were surveyed in 1715 and the first residents arrived to occupy the area in 1750. David said nobody showed up to buy a piece of the land to live in until around 1950 and the guys that showed up didn't bother buying it from William Penn's son, who weren't very nice, they just squatted and started farming and doing what they needed to do to survive here. And one of the big benefits was the Paulins Kill meadow, still called the hyper humus section. Throughout the 1800s it was used as a farm. Occasionally, people had to go in with ropes and things and dragged their cows out of the muck, because it was not a very solid meadow, and parts of it were impassable. They cut the timber off, which was mostly red maple, which is what they didn't want, because it doesn't burn well and it's not useful as lumber, because when it dries out, it twists and turns. So again, those were David's words, but he had such exciting way of saying it. What a terrific presentation he gave. David went on to say that around 1900 they discovered that there was a market for this stuff, they called peat, and farmers would come to get some in a wagon, take it up to their farm and spread it on their gardens. It was great fertilizer.

David de Witt  03:40
Peat is a kind of really interesting substance. It's mostly rotted vegetation. Okay, two kinds of peat, sphagnum peat and sedge peat. Sedge peat are grasses and canes and forest leaf litter that kind of gets deposited year after year after year. 

Mary Stone  04:01
I dug into how long it takes for peat to regenerate, and it's actually 1/32 of an inch of peat can generate per year, but it takes 1000s of years to form a significant layer once it's harvested. Plus when it's dug up, the carbon and methane gasses that the peat lands hold safely below is released into the atmosphere, and carbon dioxide, as you probably know, is believed to significantly contribute to climate change. Then there's the impact on wildlife by destroying habitats. In the 1770s the first water powered mills were built on the Paulisn Skill River, and the first effort to channel and drain the hyper humus area began in 1806. Then in the 1870s fires, floods and drought impaired the active use of the meadows. And in 1915 hyper humus Incorporated was born, followed by more draining of the Paulins Kill Meadows. Dave de Witt actually worked for hyper humus during a summer break from teaching.

David de Witt  05:04
Anyway, once we'd taken all the trees and all the stumps off, they'd bring a bulldozer in on great big, wide tracks, and they bulldoze all the living plant material and debris up in a pile. And then we'd send in the guys with the bulldozers to scrape up wind rows of peat, and then you had a device that looked like a combine with a chute that you'd go over the wind row once it was dry enough, and you'd fill up the Bombardier trucks. And these are basically trucks on just huge, wide wooden track, kind of tires. Why? Because if you spread the weight out enough. Nothing will sink in this muck. You hope anyway, later on, switched to trucks to get the stuff out of here. Where did hyper humus peat go. Rumors has it, the White House lawn is made with hyper humus. People say every golf course in the East Coast supposedly has hyper humus peat mixed in with it. It is world's best soil additive if you want a good, rich soil that holds moisture and provides some fertility in the process.

Mary Stone  06:13
So how long did you work in that capacity?

David de Witt  06:17
I worked only one summer. It was a summer job. I was teaching at Vo-tech at the time, and Dave Ellis, Pete Ellis's brother, who ran this place, he kindly gave me a job, and I just worked summer. One of the features I loved about teaching was I could do whatever I wanted with my summers. Yeah,

Mary Stone  06:35
so how did you feel about it when you were doing it? Did you feel like it was being insulting to the earth 

David de Witt  06:40
I did, and then I heard Pete's rationale. He would come down here, and you can read about newspaper quotes from his articles, he would say, Isn't this wonderful? We're creating all this habitat for migratory birds. And truthfully, they were, yeah, because this place was a duck hunter paradise, it's gone through iterations that I don't understand. When I worked here, there was a whole line of huge red maple trees, a few which survived along the western side of the stream, and big blue herons nested there. Wow. And there was a heron rookery, and there were about 10 of them that summer I worked here in their big stick nets, wow. And they'd always be fishing frogs and whatever else.

Mary Stone  07:27
From 1985 to 1988 ownership changed. Hyper humus was bought by hyper x and then by Scotts. In 1990 provisions of the Clean Water Act halted the strip mining of the peat, and in 2005 the area was purchased by the state of New Jersey as a wildlife management area. Then Ed Samanns gave his segment of the story. He is a fellow that works for WSP, a consulting company, and he shared details of how they put the plans together for the restoration by working with the Nature Conservancy as well as New Jersey Fish and Wildlife, who manages the hyper humus property as a wildlife management area. So they work together to develop a restoration plan for the Paulins Kill River and the adjoining forest and Marsh systems in trying to bring it back from the changes that occurred over the years, so that it acts as a more natural system.

Ed Samanns  08:25
For the stream restoration component, we looked at the reference habitats. Where are the streams in a similar landscape position, similar soil types under a natural condition? What do they look like? So Whittingham, there's another wildlife management area south has the same type of peat meadow system that's pretty much intact, has had some alteration, but very minimal. And that stream channel there, you'll look at an area, you'll see a nice, sinuous channel that hasn't been altered for a long time, that's 1000s of years. So that became a reference for us, is what, what's the natural channel design look like? It obviously isn't straight like this. It needs some sort of sinuosity. And we, yeah, took measurements there determine what that sinuosity would be. How many bends for? You know, 1000s of feet. We also looked at the East Branch as well of the Paulins Kill, which not too far here, away from here, and looked at that section as well, highly sinuous.

Mary Stone  09:27
Then Michelle de Blasio, the freshwater restoration manager of the Nature Conservancy, stepped up to the plate and gave some more background to the project.

Michelle de Balsio 09:38
Of all the sites across the watershed, we year after year see the poorest water quality coming out of this one mile stretch of river where we're planned to do the restoration. So to give you a sense, trout need trout maintenance streams need at least 25 degrees Celsius to maintain and hold their populations throughout the year. Every year when those summer we always see well, 28 degrees C, 30 degrees C, so well over that 25 degree Celsius. Average dissolved oxygen is another characteristic, so is the amount of flow. So adding that sinuosity back to the stream will give more oxygen to the water. Most critters in our streams need at least six milligrams per liter. Ideally, they want seven to eight milligrams per liter of dissolved oxygen concentrations in the stream. At this site in particular, we have like, two, three, usually below four. It's about 1000 acres that this restoration project will entail with about a mile of stream. So that's pretty significant. It's hard to make really big changes to water quality, but something like this really could impact the quality of the water. So that's a little bit of the science. I would just probably add, in case you don't mention it, that we've been working for many, many years on this project. It has been a long time getting to the point we're at, we have submitted permits, and it sounds like we might be pretty close to getting those permits by the end of March. Maybe

Mary Stone  11:09
The next step after they receive the permits is to secure funding to do the work in three phases, which will take years and millions of dollars, but you and I can support the cause now by using alternatives to peat moss. By the way, many potting mixes include peat moss, so look for those that don't have it in it,,and we can use compost or composted manure and locally sourced bark and sawdust for plants that prefer acidic soils. No chemically treated wood byproducts, please. Because sadly, that's what comprises much of the Dyed Mulch that people like to use, which is a pet peeve of mine, as I've probably mentioned to you. There are also pine needles and vermiculite, which is hydrated magnesium aluminum, iron silicate that looks like Mica. It's non toxic, a neutral pH, and improves heavier wet soil, and let's not forget my tried and true leaf mold that I spoke about way back in an episode. I'll put a link in the show notes that talks about leaf mold better than mulch. 

Mary Stone  12:14
It's exciting to imagine restoring the hyper humus section of the Paulinskill watershed to how it once was. It makes me think about our own lives when we wish to restore ourselves to the way we once were, back to our innate nature of kindness and love. As we go through hardships in life, sometimes we change ourselves to accommodate circumstances or people in our lives. Don't we? Like when they straightened out the Paulins Kill to make the water move more quickly so they could harvest their bounty. We sometimes change ourselves or compromise happiness to accommodate others, and that can destroy who we are or impact us greatly, but we can restore ourselves. Not to say we won't carry the wounds I call stretch marks from the history of our past, but they fade as we move forward, and those scars are badges of life lived and wisdom gained. No doubt, things won't restore to how they were in the 1700s and they still call it the hyper humus section of the Paulins Kill River Wildlife Management Area, keeping the label of the stretch marks so that we remember and learn from what happened there. That way, the lessons never fade. Garden dilemmas? Ask Mary Stone.com 

Mary Stone  13:30
Some changes are out of our control. There's no question about that. Just as some of the things that happened at the hyper humus location were out of control because invasive species have populated the area. I learned about a new one I had never seen before. It's a species of water chestnut. The nut is so sharp that it punctures bike tires or even your shoe soles. So it's becoming a huge hazard. Never mind that it's invasive as well. Maybe a topic for another time, but for now, I just wanted to thank you for visiting with me. I'm shivering here on the screen porch, but I am grateful for the opportunity of that walk and learning about the history of that area. There are some photos in a very old document that I found from 1945 I'm going to put a link in the show notes and maybe snag some of those pictures for the column post that is just neat to see. And we will learn from these things. We will keep our stretch marks - those are badges of wisdom gained, and we as a collective community can change things, as I keep saying, one yard at a time, one heart at a time. 

Mary Stone  14:43
So thanks for coming by. I always enjoy our time together, and I hope you have as well. And I would so appreciate if you could share the podcast with a friend or two, so more of us can sit together and learn and grow in this garden of life. Thank you again. See you next time on the screen porch. 

Mary Stone  15:01
You can follow Garden Dilemmas on Facebook or online at Garden Dilemmas.com and on Instagram at hashtag. Mary Elaine Stone, Garden Dilemmas Delights and Discoveries is produced by Alex Bartling. Thanks for coming by. I look forward to chatting again from my screen porch, and always remember to embrace the unexpected in this garden of life. Have a great day you.