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Comment by Cordiali | Hacker News Reader

There's test swabs for leaded paint, but I don't know if they'd be sensitive enough for food. At least where I live, they're pretty cheap, so it could be an interesting experiment.

I remember seeing an article a while ago, where some local councils here specifically recommended building raised garden beds for veggie gardens. They apparently found, that in cities/towns older than about a hundred years, the risk of soil contamination can be pretty high, the main suspects being lead and arsenic. Raised garden beds is an easy way of eliminating that risk.

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> I remember seeing an article a while ago, where some local councils here specifically recommended building raised garden beds for veggie gardens. They apparently found, that in cities/towns older than about a hundred years, the risk of soil contamination can be pretty high, the main suspects being lead and arsenic. Raised garden beds is an easy way of eliminating that risk.

I'd recommend raised beds to anyone who lives in a suburb or city that's even a few decades old. The particulates and oils washing off the street and down roof shingles alone introduces plenty of contamination. Very rainy regions like the Pacific Northwest have to build rain gardens [1] everywhere to filter out baseline levels of suburban pollution, otherwise their water gets really bad.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_garden

Yeah, City Slickers in Oakland stopped testing the soil and just told everyone that they should use raised beds. Problem is that there are so many fruit trees and self starting plants that I want to eat (I'm looking at you collards), but I'd like to know what I'm getting into.

Also I've read that sunflowers are really good at pulling up heavy metals, and all of the bags that I purchase have warning labels on them. I'm curious if this is a real concern!

IIRC sunflowers store heavy metals in their fatty tissues, which means it's particularly concentrated in their seeds, so if you're using them to pull heavy metals out of your soil you should probably be sending the wilted plant away at the end of the season, seeds and all.

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