How Lead Gets Into Urban Vegetable Gardens Boulder CO (SPX) Nov
03, 2010 If you're a vegetable gardener in a lot of older
cities, there's a fair chance you have a significant amount of
lead in your soil. One common mitigation approach is to build a
raised bed and fill it with freshly composted, low-lead soil
from elsewhere, right? Maybe not, according to researchers
studying the mysterious case of the lead contamination found
within raised beds in community gardens in the Boston
communities of Roxbury and Dorchester. "Raised beds are
surrounded by a sea of contaminated soil," said Daniel Brabander
of Wellesley College. Brabander, his students and colleagues
have been studying the lead in 144 backyard gardens in
coordination with The Food Project, an organization committed to
food security, nutrition and sustainable urban agriculture.
Eighty-one percent of the gardens they studied were found to
have lead levels above the U.S. EPA limits of 400 micrograms of
lead per gram ( g/g) of soil. To solve that problem,