Culture
How to Build a Safer Urban Garden
In a recent survey, 71 percent of home gardens in New York City had too much lead in their soil. Here’s how green-thumbs anywhere can avoid it.
City gardens are blooming. In backyards, rooftops, and community lots, the number of U.S. urban dwellers growing food jumped from 7 million to 9 million from 2008 to 2013. Nearly one third of the country’s public elementary schools had a gardening program as of 2013, up 11 percent since 2008. Urban schools are especially likely to have them, and for great reasons: Studies show health and learning benefits for young children exposed to growing plants.
But among the chard and cherry tomatoes are trace metals, enduring in the soil. Particularly worrisome is lead, a vestige of the industries, house paints, and gasoline mixtures of 19th- and 20th-century urban life.