Post 2: The Lead Discovery/Worms

You find out if you have heavy metals in your soil by testing the soil at a lab. We had tested the front yard soil with the lab at UMASS, an inexpensive test, and that came out fine, so we never bothered to check the backyard.

The discovery came when our friend Darren was teaching a gardening class at our house. He'd demo'd how to gather a soil sample with his class (by taking samples from 3 places and mixing them), and then sent it off to one of the premiere testing services. The point of the exercise was not so much to test for metals, but to get the soil nutrient readings. Then he was going to show the class how to interpret the report and apply those results to a garden.

But when the report came back, all other readings meant nothing. The lead levels were so high that Darren did not even want his class working in the back yard, so he cancelled all of the hands on portions of the class. This is understandable, but also a little alarming since we'd been "hands on" in the garden for nearly 14 years.

Next we took samples from the same three spots and sent them to three different testing services in order to test the testers. All three showed elevated lead (and zinc), though the numbers did not exactly agree, so the prognosis varies somewhat from "sorta bad" to "very bad". I'm going to link the pdfs of the reports to this post.

The next step testing-wise is to do a whole barrage of samples from different points in the yard to see if the lead levels fluctuate. We're also going to test some veggie leafs to see if they're uptaking lead.

Erik had a physical recently and asked to be screened for lead. His blood tests show no elevated levels of lead, which is excellent.

About the worms:

I should note that when we took the initial samples Darren was concerned that he saw no worms when we dug. He believes that an organic garden like ours should be well populated with worms, and even before the results suspected something was wrong. Our other garden guru, Nancy, is not so certain that the scarcity is so ominous, and thinks that they will build over time, but more slowly, as our yard is fairly arid. In any case, having the lack of worms pointed out to us was a bit disturbing. We'd never really thought about it, but its true--in other people's gardens you'll see worms in every handful of soil. I'd like to see our worm population increase. When I do, I'll know the yard is healing.