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.

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.