It’s Like Toxic Waste in Your Backyard
- Posted by: ChristineTan
- on May 17, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Gardening is no longer a hobby restricted to grandparents as it has recently gotten more popular among many households as well as urban ones. However, a recent NY Times article has revealed that more often than not, many of these gardens are contaminated with lead. This is especially true for ones that are situated near buildings that were built before 1978. After all, older buildings have lead. It is the lead from those buildings that have contaminated the gardens nearby.
This is disconcerting because in cities, there are multitudes of buildings built before 1978. Unbeknown to many city-dwellers, they are either inhaling the lead from the gardens or feasting from contaminated crops.
Interestingly, households of all ends of the socioeconomic spectrum are affected by this revelation. In fact, even the Obamas have lead contamination in their vegetable garden. So since low levels of contamination are extremely harmful, all households ought to take the extra precautions to lower the count of lead.
This does not mean that you need to stop gardening altogether, because gardening is good! It’s good for your stress level, your nutrition and your wallet – that is if it is organic because otherwise you fork out the dollars on pesticides. The article encourages you to continue gardening by offering some ways in which you can purge your garden of lead. My favorite solution is to plant certain crops, especially greens like spinach or also root vegetables, and surprisingly lime, which will then leach the soil of lead – of course that means you won’t be making a salad with this stuff because it’s basically like toxic waste, but this may be easier than replacing a whole bed of soil. (The article explains more thoroughly how this works as it lowers the count of lead). While you can’t eat these lead-leaching crops, you can plant tomatoes, beans, squash and other “fruiting crops.” As long as you keep the dog, cat or toddler away from the toxic vegetables, you should be okay. Or you could resort to the other solutions the article provides.
Go here for more (which you should).
DISCUSSION: 2 Comments
Yikes, when you read stuff like this and signs that pregnant women should not eat Tuna, you kind of get mad at the society of people for our pollution. I love the stencils near surfrider beach, which read, “only fools litter.” Indeed, but it stinks that people like the Obamas have to eat lead because of those fools. One more lovely thing contaminated. We’re all connected for better or worse.
It sucks that anyone, – Obama-like, or otherwise – would have to eat lead because of irresponsible building!