Of course, these stories, while deeply personal, are also the same stories that people have been telling for millennia. Try saying the words to reap and to sow with a straight face, and not at church. It’s hard, isn’t it? But these ancient words, and these ancient acts, connect our stories across time. That may sound like a heavy historical weight for a little plot of salad greens to carry, but as you pick the slugs off the lettuce and later tell the story of the slippery guck they left on your fingers, you can be sure that the trail oozes back a very long time.
It was a melon that brought this historical and narrative dimension home, most powerfully, for me. A dear friend is involved with the Cantaloupe Garden, a collective garden in Montreal. I’d always found the name charming and evocative, but didn’t give it much thought until I found out that growing in the Cantaloupe Garden is a particular melon variety called the Montreal Melon that dates back to the French settlers of the seventeenth century. This is truly a melon with a capital-H History, and stories galore. Grown on the island of Montreal since the late 1600s, this enormous melon—it can reach 20 pounds or more—was once so popular (the melon’s green flesh carries a hint of nutmeg) that by the late 1800s it was one of the three main exports from the city. According to a publication on the melon’s history (yes, this fruit rates a booklet), compiled by Lee Taylor and Adrian Gould, a package of the fruit was sent overseas to King Edward VII; thereafter, melons shipped to hotels in Boston, Chicago, and New York were stamped with the royal name and commanded top dollar. Taylor and Gould characterize this time as a period of “Montreal melon madness,” a mania fed by fashion and flavor.
The fruit’s fortunes started to change in the 1920s, when melons that were easier to grow and transport began to dominate the market. The city’s melon farms were plowed under for suburban homes, and the Montreal Melon virtually disappeared in just a few decades. But not completely. In the mid-1990s Montreal writer Mark Abley tracked down a packet of seeds from an Iowa seed bank and passed some along to a local grower, Ken Taylor of Windmill Point Farm. The melon was suddenly back in cultivation and it has since caught on. Festivals have celebrated this unusually spicy musk melon; growers have held competitions to try to tip the scales with giants. And everyone who plants it is growing its story, cultivating its history.
STORIES ARE A very particular kind of knowledge—information multiplied and transformed through the creative and generative urge to share—but homegrown food also offers us a much more basic, and reassuring, form of knowledge. Quite simply, when we’re the ones doing the planting and the growing, we know exactly where our food comes from. It is a rare commercial transaction where we can say this with much confidence. But for the food we produce ourselves, there’s little doubt. In the language of agricultural production, we control the inputs.
To a degree, anyway. While we control what we add to the soil, we don’t necessarily know what’s already there. Many people who are thinking about growing food in cities raise this issue as a major concern. They worry that urban soils are, by definition, contaminated. It’s prudent to wonder. But I’d argue that it’s equally important to ask different questions as well. Do we know what’s in the agricultural soils where the great majority of our food comes from—in China and Latin America, for example? Do we know what chemicals are regularly used to produce the fruits and vegetables grown globally and shipped to North America? Are any of these chemicals banned here but used elsewhere, and do any of these chemicals remain in the imported food we eat? According to the Progressive Policy Institute’s 2007 report Spoiled: Keeping Tainted Food Off America’s Tables, 98.7 percent of imported food is never inspected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the USDA. What are the health and environmental standards related to the use of sewage sludge on agricultural lands? Ask these questions and the soil in our cities might start to seem like something we can control, something a little less worrisome.
But definitely not altogether worry free. Each of us will find our own comfort level, but for anyone with even a smidgen of doubt about the health of their soil, there are some straightforward steps to take. In my first home, for example, I was worried about growing food beside the fence, which had the suspicious green glow of pressure-treated wood. (This was in the late 1980s, before chromated copper arsenate was a restricted-use product.) I certainly didn’t want to eat any vegetables contaminated by the stuff. So I sent soil samples to the provincial environment ministry. The report came back that yes, there were elevated levels of heavy metals but still within consumption guidelines. I guess my comfort level has a slightly paranoid edge to it—I ditched the root vegetables and stuck with fruiting plants such as tomatoes, which absorb less in the way of metals from the soil. At my current home, however, in an area of Toronto that has no history of industrial activity, I didn’t bother to do a soil test. Most of my vegetables are in pots, anyway. But at the community garden where I grow vegetables directly in the ground, we did have soil tests done. The site had formerly been a fire station, a lumber yard, and who knows what else. Again, the results weren’t worrying, but we replaced the soil and built up the soil level in the beds just to be entirely safe.
Worrying about the health of our urban soils serves an obvious, useful purpose in that it often leads us to soil testing—a good
> City Soil Safety
Just how safe are urban soils for the growing of food? Short of having your soil tested, it’s impossible to know for sure what contaminants might be present.
But there are risk factors you can take into account: exterior paints (on buildings and fences) that may have been applied before lead in paints was regulated; nearby industries or autobody shops that may be releasing or leaking toxic substances; historical industrial uses of your land; heavily traveled roads and highways in close proximity that may have left a legacy of elevated lead levels in soil from the era of leaded gasoline.
If any of these risk factors are present, it would be prudent to have your soil tested. In the U.S., contact the local agricultural extension agent or your city’s public health or environment unit. In Canada, contact your province’s environment ministry or your city’s public health or environment office. If a soil test reveals elevated lead levels, consider taking the following steps to reduce your risk:
> Use raised beds or containers filled with clean topsoil, and place a semi-permeable barrier, such as landscape cloth (available at nurseries or hardware stores), between the existing soil and the newly added soil.
> Maintain alkaline soil conditions (a pH of 7 or higher) through additions of lime, and add compost high in phosphate, which has been shown to reduce the mobility of lead in the soil, making it less likely to be absorbed by plants.
> Avoid inhaling dust or soil particles when gardening, and (it hardly needs saying) wear gloves and wash your hands after digging in the dirt.
> Wash all fruits and vegetables (some people recommend using detergent) before you eat them. This will remove the lead risk from any soil or dust adhering to the plant.
> If you’re still worried, only grow fruiting crops, such as tomatoes, beans, peas, and squash, which absorb much less lead than root crops. (Leafy vegetables absorb more lead than fruiting crops but less than root crops.)
> Plant vegetables and fruits away from the foundations of buildings and painted surfaces.
> Finally, if you’re an adventurous soul with time on your hands and a yen for home science experiments, a backyard phytoremediation project might be worth looking into. Phytoremediation involves the use of plants to accumulate contaminants and “clean” the soil; obviously, the plants are destroyed rather than eaten. Samantha Langley-Turnbaugh of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Southern Maine did tests using spinach, sunflowers, and Indian mustard as phytoaccumulators