Some urban gardeners go to town with vegetables in their backyard. Some build raised beds to avoid eating lead, cadmium, and arsenic that commonly contaminates urban lots. This info sheet is helpful, but it raises more questions for me than it answers: Urban Gardens and Soil Contaminants. It seems to suggest that urban gardeners forgo expensive soil tests and simply build raised beds on the assumption that the soil is contaminated. But it also mentions that planting in enriched soil (which I will be doing) can decrease the amount of contaminants taken up by the plants. What to do?
Something seems fundamentally wrong to me about carting in loads of soil to pile on top of soil that's already in my yard. Of course I don't want to eat heavy metals, but I'm very curious about the degree to which planting in compost-rich soil can reduce the plants' intake of contaminants. I'm not going to start out with the assumption that my soil is unusable for vegetables. Instead, I'm going to stick with my original plan and get the soil tested right away when I move in. I was going to do a lead test and a basic soil composition test through the University of Minnesota, but now I'll add tests for arsenic and cadmium.
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