The Challenges of Gardening in a City

Lead, arsenic, mattress frames and other urban gardening discoveries

“Get your soil tested!” That’s what everyone told me before moving into our new house. I did get it tested and our results didn’t reveal anything too shocking but I heard from many folks who found heavy metals in their garden soil. It got me thinking about how these foreign materials got there. Why is lead all over Pittsburgh yards? And how did arsenic sneak into so much local soil?

For a recent episode of NEXTpittsburgh’s Yinzer Backstage Pass I chatted with folks from the Allegheny County Conservation District to learn more about soil testing and the challenges of gardening in city limits.

As I learned from Hayly and Ebony, it’s common practice to simply bulldoze an abandoned house into its own basement. Those old houses were often painted with lead paint – it was banned in the late 1970s – and as the house decomposes (or doesn’t) that lead paint crumbles and becomes part of the soil. Soil tests often finds arsenic in urban soil as well. Up until the last century, arsenic was used as both an herbicide and pesticide on farms and orchards.

Gardening with any level of heavy metals can be dangerous and ACCD has a range recommendations for how to farm in a space with contaminated soil. If your lead levels are low (151 - 400 parts per million), they recommend washing produce thoroughly and minimizing dust on your property so that you’re not breathing in any lead particles. If your lead levels are higher they recommend staying away from root crops and leafy greens. At some point it might make sense to grow all your produce in raised beds with clean soil that you’ve trucked (or wheel-barrowed) in.

Hayly brought a fancy XRF Spectrometer with her so that she could show us how a soil sample is analyzed. I watched as elements and percentages flashed on the machine’s screen. And I realized that these elements – these traces of lead and arsenic – are also telling stories of a changing neighborhood. What structures stood on these abandoned lots-turned-farms? What families lived here? Where did they go? Who was the farmer who sprayed arsenic on his apple orchard to fight off a moth infestation a hundred years ago? What varieties of apples grew on those trees?

I’ll probably never know the answers to these questions but its inspiring that these abandoned lots with mysterious histories are finally getting a future. I may never know what that apple tasted like from that orchard of yore but I can know what a tomato from Ebony’s farm tastes like. And so can all her neighbors.

Have you tested your soil? What have you learned? I’d love to hear about it.

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And one more thing: A pair of robins built a nest somewhere in the Virginia creeper that grows on our fence. The egg must have hatched because the other week a puffy toddler/teenage robin was hopping around our yard.

I haven’t seen this young bird for a few days but maybe they just grow up that fast?

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