Risk of lead poisoning from urban gardening is low, new study finds

Kids get creative with kale in an urban garden in Tacoma, Washington.

Using compost is the single best thing you can do to protect your family from any danger associated with lead in urban soils. Good compost will also guarantee that you will have plenty of vegetables to harvest.

That’s the main finding of a paper appearing this month in the Journal of Environmental Quality. The University of Washington-led study looked at potential risks associated with growing vegetables in urban gardens and determined that the benefits of locally produced vegetables in cities outweigh any risks from gardening in contaminated soils.

“People are terrified of soils in urban areas. They always think it’s a mystery brew of toxins in the soil, but in vast majority of cases, the contamination is lead,” said lead author Sally Brown, a UW research associate professor of environmental and forest sciences. “We’ve shown that lead is harmful by eating the dirt, not from eating the lettuce grown in the dirt.”