We have a lot of little seedlings that are growing up so fast, and we even have a few flowers on some tomatoes — but right now the most exciting things are the irises and strawberries! Purple and green must be the colors right now as the clematis on the fence is blooming too. Red is starting to make a showing, as after I took these strawberry pics last week, a few have started to ripen…

Maybe you’ve noticed this sign talking about “Our Legacy of Lead” on our shed, and it’s there for an important reason. One thing Prospect Farm has worked on since the beginning is improving our soil quality. Like any urban green space that has existed alongside roads and highways for more than 40 years, our soil is contaminated from the lead in exhaust, even though it’s been many years since gas has had lead in it. Soil near houses older than 50 years also tend to have elevated lead levels from the paint chipping off over time.

It’s difficult to extract lead from soil, so the most effective approach is to add more to it in order to bring its overall concentration down — things like compost, which is why we maintain our well-organized composting system! We test a selection of our beds year-to-year (Brooklyn College’s Soil Lab is our go-to resource for this), and, for the most part, our numbers have improved a lot. But we’ve noticed in the last couple of years that some beds have jumped back up, most likely from rainwater run-off coming down from the hill where we haven’t remediated the soil.

Lead contamination is of particular concern for young people as excessive exposure to lead can cause developmental problems, reduce brain function, and affect motor skills. Just touching lead-contaminated soils will not cause problems, but what will is breathing in high-lead dust or eating lead-contaminated soil (i.e., by not washing hands before eating). As for eating plants grown in soil with high lead, the Soil Science of America lead info page has this info:

It’s hard to be exposed to lead by eating vegetables or fruits. Plants do not take up lead on purpose, because lead is not a plant nutrient. Plants may contain measurable amounts of lead, but this isn’t because plants are actively taking up lead from soil, but because we’re able to measure very low concentrations of lead in environmental samples.

Additionally, lead is generally more likely to be found in the greens of a plant than fruit (e.g., tomatoes!), so we plant strategically based on our test results. We generally don’t plant any root vegetables in the soil, since it’s hard to wash all the soil off, though we’ve tried a few in containers. But we are looking into other ways of planting safely while we work on improving our soil, like utilizing rain gutters as containers.

We’ve already planted three rain gutters with greens and herbs

Our other experiment this year is straw bale gardening. One of our members picked up a bale from a nearby café’s leftover Halloween decoration, which was helpfully already broken down a bit, saving us some prep time. Then for ten days everyone who came on their watering shift sprinkled the bale with fertilizer and doused it with water to prime it with nutrients. Now we’ve covered the straw with a layer of soil mixed with compost and planted two spots with watermelon seeds. The plants will grow into the straw bale, and at the end of the season, we can mix the remaining straw into the bed to further amend the soil. We’re curious to see how it goes!

Watermelon seeds going in

We encourage members and visitors to be cautious working in and around our soil, especially younger folks. The most important tips from the posted sign are to wash your hands after gardening/playing and be mindful of tracking soil/dust into your home. If you are harvesting veggies, wash them thoroughly before eating. Also keep in mind these hazards are possible in most green spaces in the city!

We had a productive work day on Sunday, turning over several beds and planting seedlings members picked up from a GreenThumb giveaway, as well as some seedlings from our planting committee. There were a lot of tomatoes, as well as peppers, eggplants, greens, okra, a couple more cucumbers, and some mystery plants that might be broccoli? We also have some mystery tomatoes from GreenThumb. Could they be cherry tomatoes? We’ll find out soon!

One new thing we are trying this year is planting in gutters. So far we put in (what we’re pretty sure is) kale and some swiss chard. Already we have planted up about half of our beds, and we hope we’ll have a little sun this week to encourage our seedlings along.

We were hoping to have a work day and begin planting this weekend, but instead the farm is blanketed in snow. The collards that kept going all winter might finally succumb to winter’s delayed departure.

Despite this set back, we are still planning for a work day on an upcoming Saturday, if the weather will cooperate. March 25th or April 1st (or both!) will be days to prep beds, repair compost bins, and hopefully get some seeds in the ground. Our planting committee has been testing and starting seeds.

We are also planning our annual Earth Day event for April 22nd — more details to come!

We had our first group meeting at the farm today to meet and orient new members and start talking about the planting plan for 2017. Since the weather was so nice, we also got some early clean-up done, clearing out around the tulips and daffodils. The planting committee hopes to start organizing over the next two weeks, so we’ll be ready to get seeds started/planted and start this year off strong.

We’ve planned our first official work day of the year for next Saturday, March 4th from 10 AM until 1 PM. We’ll be trench composting, turning over beds, and doing more general cleanup.

You can tell how mild this winter was, as we have a lot of greens still going strong from last year. The asian greens and arugula were planted late last summer as a fall crop, but the collards have been going since last spring!