In New York City, many, if not most of the community gardens are located on sites of buildings that have either burned down or been torn down. A major soil contaminant, here, is residual lead that came from lead paint in the building debris that filtered into the soil. There has been a major initiative among the various community gardening entities - New York City GreenThumb, The Trust for Public Land and New York Restoration Project - to test the soil in the community gardens for lead and other heavy metals (as well as general pH and nutrients, etc.). Gardeners are encouraged to remediate any problem areas with heavy applications of compost and/or avoid planting edible crops on contaminated soils. Traditionally, community gardens on City-owned property were required to plant only in raised beds with fresh soil/compost to try to avoid contact with potentially lead-contaminated soil.
Jess On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 7:23 AM, karen jones <krjo...@mts.net> wrote: > Last year the ACGA partnered with the food movement people for a telephone > conference on Brownfields. I just listened to it last night. Ann Carroll > from the EPA (wish we had an EPA in Canada) talked about gardens on urban > soils and the suites of contaminants which might possibly be in urban soils. > There are lots of them. But any of you who haven't thought about the use of > the land you garden on before you started your garden, please think about > that. We know that air is polluted and that water is polluted too, why don't > we think that soil could be polluted as well... I have contacted Ann and > asked her to provide me with a list of chemicals as well as the other stuff > that could be in soils. I will share these when I recieve a reply from her. > Gardening has become a big venue for the poverty industry here in Manitoba > and it is managed by people who have degrees in people management. They > understand very little, if anything about science, and chemistry, botany etc > scare them alot, so they are sticking their heads in the sand about > contaminated soils. They broadcast far and wide about how they are helping > poor people with nutrition, but do not want to even consider the possibility > that they are poisioning people with veg grown in toxic soils. > I know that in a few jurisdictions governments are aware of this and have > tried to educate gardeners. If you are from one of these jurisdictions could > you please share? Denver was mentioned as a best practice type of place for > site selection for community gardens. Denverites , could you share? Thanks, > Karen > > _______________________________________________ > The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of > ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to > find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org > > To post an e-mail to the list: community_garden@list.communitygarden.org > > To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: > http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org > -- Jessica Katz Brooklyn, NY ************************************************************ "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." "To forget to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves." - Mahatma Gandhi -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20110304/74b96fac/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: community_garden@list.communitygarden.org To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
