Treating Lead Poisoning in your Urban Garden Harvests

Ever since the 2020 pandemic, Urban Gardening has slowly paved its way into the Indonesian zeitgeist. Aside from providing a therapeutic outlet, growing fruits and vegetables in an urban environment are also a neat way to ensure food resilience albeit in a microscopic scale. However, many have reported that urban soils contained some levels of dangerous contaminants, like heavy metals.

Heavy metal contaminants such as lead, copper, and aluminium, are commonly found in urban soil. Trace amounts are believed to come mainly from industrialization and urban development. These toxins are largely present in acidic soils, even more so in homes painted with lead-based paints and those built along older streets. Human exposure to these toxins can result in health adverse effects mainly in children; such as intellectual and behavioral problems. These contaminants can reach our body via the fruits and vegetables we harvest from our backyard.

To minimize the risk of ingesting these harmful toxins is through bio-remediation. Bio-remediation is essentially ’healing’ a contaminated area by the use of biological organism as remedy. In the context of Urban Gardening, many research have pointed out the benefits of composting as a means to safeguard our harvest from toxic contaminants.

Compost can remediate the soil by lowering the bio-availability of the heavy metals, or in layman’s term, reducing the likelihood of absorption by plants. One paper from the Journal of Hazardous Materials (2016), reported that soil remediation by compost made from cow dung, water hyacinth, and sawdust over twelve weeks resulted in lower amounts of heavy metal in the contaminated soil.

Of course, access to high quality compost may be unfeasible for hobbyist or beginner gardeners. There are however, cheaper ways to lower our exposure to contaminants present in our harvest:

-          Using a raised bed with clean soil over concrete or a lining over the old soil.

-          Growing fruity crops as they take up less contaminants than leafy or root and tuber vegetables.

-          Adding garden lime to soil to control its acidity