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Soil, Compost & Mulch

lead contaminated soil

12 years ago

I recently tested my soil to find it has high lead content -640 ppm. After a lot of reading and searching I found some info on planting mustard and sunflowers to help pull contaminates out of soil. I plan on filling my garden/yard with these plants this year and then testing again next. My plans of a wild vegetable garden in Chicago has been put on hold. I also read that plants producing fruit do not absorb heavy metals in the fruit -i plan on growing a few plants in the dirt and testing the tomatoes to see. Does anyone have experience with this? Does phytoremediation work?

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Comments (3)

feijoas
12 years ago
My front yard is heavily lead contaminated.
I was eliminating lawn and thought it could be an opportunity to plant more food...now I know its status, I'm keeping it to ornamental plants, since they don't care about lead!
I have plenty of 'clean' garden out the back, so I wasn't going to try phytoremediation, but I did read a lot about it.
It seems to me that it's likely to take years of growing and disposing of phytoremediation plants in toxic waste dumps.
Paul Stamets has had good results with oyster mushrooms.
From what I've read, lead doesn't travel easily in plant tissue, so the further from the soil and the more processes it must pass through, the more dilute it becomes.
So roots, no way, but fruit and seeds...well, I still wouldn't.
Kids and animals are REALLY sensitive to lead. If you have children, I'd avoid growing anything in there that will be eaten.
The advice I got was to dispose of contaminated soil, and/or build raised beds. I'm generally not a fan of raised beds, but they could be your best option...not the kind of garden you envision, but a garden!
Kimmsr
12 years ago
As a rule, except for the leafy things wee eat, plants do not uptake and store lead in the fruits that we eat. There is good evidence that maintaining a soil pH above 6.5 will also help. The majhor problem with lead in soil is of someone eats, ingests, that soil. Growing crops in soils contaminated with lead, generally, will not present a problem.
Because plants do not, as a rule, accumulate or uptake lead remediation by growing bioaccumulating crops does not work in lead contaminated soils. Constructing raised beds will get your gardens above that contamination, but mostly root crops (those in very close contact with your contaminated soil) would be the ones with the most lead contamination and that can be washed off.

Here is a link that might be useful: Lead in soil
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Just out of curiosity, do you have some reason to believe that your soil is contaminated with lead? Chemical dump sites can have all kinds of bad stuff in them. Not just lead. Roadside beds, especially with alkaline soil, are almost always contaminated with lead, because of the lead that used to be added to gasoline, though not usually at levels that are considered hazardous. You might get in touch with your local city resource recovery office. They might do the test for free. Around here, they do (for both lead and arsenic and, while they're at it, major plant nutrients). Whyever should they do this for free? I suspect that they're looking for seriously polluted sites, and lots of federal money is available for remediation if they find any. Offering tests for plant nutrients gives them hundred of samples from interested gardeners, who are also interested in possible contaminants.
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I can probably find out some laboratories for you if you actually want to run tests (if you let me know where you are located). My email is in my page. Also, i would suggest you do the test at 3 depths to pin down where the contamination may reside, maybe 1 ft down, 2.5 ft down, and 5 ft down. VOC samples can cost around $80 bucks a piece. There may be some more inexpensive test kits that can provide an indication of contamination without specific results of the individual compounds. You can call pine environmental, who is an equipment supplier to the environmental remediation industry and pick their brains. They also have field screening equipment available for rent (and they ship).
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what about putting spent brewery grains underneath your layer of chips? i'd imagine it might even work against the invasive plants, as well as aiding in the decomposition of the chips... speaking of mycoremediation, i had my first experience with Oak chips, used as mulch, this winter. the fungi seem to thrive on oak more than any other wood i've encountered. we mulched the paths with something like 5-8" of them, and after a few weeks and a tiny bit of rain, the mycelium had filled the spaces between the chips, all the way up to the surface. you'd see white spots, where mold was growing on the path. total awesomeness. also, we've been getting rain for the past week or so, and the usual heavy run-off has been totally absent. the chips (and whatever's living among them) are just soaking it all up. it's like walking on a sponge. i've wondered about planting in mulches for a while now. i've been meaning to ask someone.. would it be be good, say in a thick mulch, 1-2', to dig a hole through the entire mulch, and then partially or completely fill the hole with soil to plant in? that would eliminate shadows from a steep mulch wall, as well as danger of weeds growing through a thin, tapered mulch edge. you know what i mean?
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I would add to kimmsr's excellent explanation that it is not necessary to 'eat' large amounts of contaminated soil as you would normally think of eating. It is actually referred to by risk assessors as passive ingestion, including dust and dirt on your hands transferred while eating, chewing fingernails, etc.; the aforementioned dirt adhered to vegetables; and airborne dust that sticks to the inside of the mouth while breathing and is ingested. Most of this passive exposure is invisible tiny particles. It's estimated a person passively ingests about 200 mg of soil and dust per day, children 400. Assuming you don't grow veggies there, the risk from the strip of lead-contaminated soil around the foundations of old houses is averaged with the rest of the yard which is typically lower. CDC and EPA have lots of informative web pages and brochures on this, but I think it doesn't require 25 ft. distance, but more like 5 ft. Lead dust tends to not travel far from where it falls.
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feijoas
12 years ago
I agree with kimmsr: there's very little lead movement in plants and your major danger is from lead in the soil.
I avoid contact with the soil: a really thick mulch is a good start.
But even if it's 'safe' to eat the plants from lead-contaminated soil, how would they be washed? I wouldn't want the lead leaving my place and I definitely wouldn't grow anything where I had to disturb the roots.
I'm generally pretty casual about stuff, but heavy-metal contamination's a bit beyond casual.
Of course that kind of thing has to be balance with at least you KNOW what's in your soil and can work around it. I assume there's a lot of commercial crops grown on contaminated soil...

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