For years, the mounds of rich, carefully sifted soil piled in a hidden depot in Mattapan were like manna to the city’s growing ranks of gardeners.
But the thousands of tons of finely ground compost massed in the woods off American Legion Highway are now off-limits to Boston residents hoping to use it to grow tomatoes, squash, or any of the hundreds of thousands of pounds of fruits and vegetables that come from gardens across the city.
Comments
I feed my compost with organically grown food scraps and material from my own yard, which is never sprayed with anything. I love the idea of municipal composting programs, but people are still foolishly spraying with toxic pesticides and herbicides, and there's a lot of contamination in urban environments. That's the lesson here: everything is connected. Here's a history of lead-arsenate pesticides and how they contaminate the soil with lead: http://soils.tfrec.wsu.edu/leadhistory.htm This pesticide has been used for ages, especially on apple orchards. I hope they are testing the compost for arsenic as well. Here's some information about dealing with contaminated soils for gardening: http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/horticulture/DG2543.html Note that leafy vegetables and root crops can most readily absorb the lead from the soil. Unfortunately, bioremediation (using plants to absorb toxins from the soil, then discarding the plants) is less effective with lead contamination.