Post 1: Introduction

The yard told me to do it. It's a long story. But I think this will be a valuable record of the healing of a little parcel of land in LA, and perhaps some people, too.

Background:

To be as concise as possible, the soil in our back yard is contaminated with lead, probably from a combination of flaking lead paint and air pollution. We haven't done all the testing yet so we don't know if every part of the yard is is effected. More on the soil reports & etc. will come in a separate post. I'll also post pdfs of the initial soil reports.

Now, we've lived on this land since 1998 and have been unwittingly growing food on it almost as long, and eating that food, and we're not dead yet. Maybe not even damaged. Hard to say. Erik had a blood test which shows no elevated lead levels. If we had a kid, I'd be more worried--but we don't. Nonetheless, knowing your soil is contaminated makes everything that comes out of it newly suspect, and that sort of takes the bloom off the rose. So to speak.

On a practical level we're doing the following things to address this problem--things which we were pretty much doing anyway before we found out about the lead:

• Mulching all the open spaces (since we don't have lawn--turf would also hold down lead dust)
• Planting lots of perennial natives (plant cover protects the soil, or us from the soil, and it also reduces the space we have for edible crops.)
• Growing all our food, with the exception of herbs (which are already in the ground and I'm not moving them), in raised beds. More on the beds later. They'll get their own post.
• Keeping calm and carrying on. Truth is, our soil is probably typical for the area. That sucks, but we're not especially cursed or unlucky. This is what we've done to our environment. This is the mess we all have to live in. Knowing our situation just makes us live it more consciously.

(We're not doing phytoremediation because that is a many, many year process and we want to live in our yard and work with it and eat out of it, just as we always have. The other major option is to tear out every bit of the soil and all the living plants in the yard, send it all to the landfill or maybe even some toxic waste facility, and replace all our soil with imported soil and start all over again. Yeah. No.)

That takes care of the practical stuff. What this blog is concerned with is the impractical stuff. We're going to develop a tight relationship with the land, and everything on it. We're going to work with our yard to help it heal. Of course nothing can lift the lead from the soil, it's there forever, but perhaps the yard can learn to work around that contamination. This journey, I predict, will take us strange places. I don't think we'll quite be the same people by this time next year.