Our family will not lack for jalepenos this winter. We have a freezer full of them. In upcoming weeks, I will probably learn how to pickle them, and perhaps I will be able to give jars to friends at Christmas instead of chutneys or jams. Not very Christmas-sy, I know.
I never planned to have jalapenos at all, really. I ordered these seeds well after the bulk of my main order, made with high expectation in December. The order did include fifty different types of veggies, fruit trees, bulbs, and medicinal herbs. I even ordered seven different types of peppers, including two hot cayenne varieties to make into an organic bug spray for my tomatoes; but no jalapenos. My husband gasped at my glaring omission when our seeds arrived in February, and I quickly ordered the seeds to placate him.
This was before we found out about the lead. In fact, we were still deep into “finish the deer fence mode” as well as “finish the stone retaining wall mode.” The whole winter, when the weather was seasonable, had been devoted to erecting a two-hundred linear foot, wooden deer fence complete with tree-branch railings at the eight foot mark. The fact that the garden had two distinct levels, having been cut into a hillside, meant that I had to complete a four-foot high, sixty-foot long stone retaining wall. Many of the stones were dug
Wall, almost completed
out from various areas of our property and transported down to the edge of the yard.
Why? Why did we take this on? This echoed in my mind in those dark, snowy December days as I hauled rocks by hand across the yard. We had to remind ourselves, at this time of dreary cold and seeing nothing in our “garden” but mud and half-accomplished projects, that we purchased this property to grow food — in part. We also loved this old, 250-year old house with a passion, but mostly we saw the possibility of being more self-sufficient. Wood heats our house and we have drastically cut back on our oil/electric consumption. Our dream was to grow most, if not all, of our own veggies and keep chickens to provide eggs for our family. This we could do here. There was enough space, and Amy (our resident real farmer, who runs CSA’s for a living) pronounced our soil as “black gold.”
But then, with the fence done, the gate well on its way, and the stone wall finished, I began planting greens on the top terrace and building beds on the bottom terrace for the later May planting. In addition to the black gold, I was finding a lot of trash: glass, metal objects, more glass, and more glass, some of which looked burned and melted. I could see soil changes (my training as an archaeologist coming in handy for once) that marked areas of more and less trash. One area had soil that looked burned. When I found a cache of twelve old-fashioned strap hinges while digging my potato bed, my heart sank. I was beginning to suspect that we had a problem. My neighbor confirmed that an owner from thirty years past burned architectural debris from job sites down there. He didn’t want to pay to have them taken to the dump. I knew we had a problem. It was not 24 hours before I had six soil samples sent off to Penn State, and they confirmed our worst fear two weeks later. Lead, and lots of it.
I broke my ankle the same day we received the test results. I spent a few days wallowing in self-pity, in terrible pain, and confined to the downstairs. Then I began researching on the web. What I found scared me to death, but also gave me some hope. I reached out to local agriculture groups and found a soil scientist and a remediation consultant who both offered their advice willingly to me; pro bono I might add. I guess I sounded just that pathetic. Areas of low contamination could be remediated with soil amendments as well as by planting sunflowers, cabbage, and kale. These were not to be composted, but would be taken to a hazardous goods disposal at the end of the season. Areas of higher contamination had to be covered with a puncture proof barrier (carpet scraps), then a thick layer of polyethylene (inert for a thousand years), then six inches or more of wood chips, then raised beds with a stone base to prevent puncture of the poly by gardening tools. I calculated the amounts of wood chips and soil I would need, and started to cry again. Forty-five cubic yards of each. That is three large dump trucks each of soil and chips, all of which had to be transported wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow from the driveway to the garden. The work needed to fix this problem seemed insurmountable to a person with a broken ankle.
For a month I couldn’t even look in the direction of the garden, but as I progressed from completely helpless to semi-helpless, I began to take baby steps, both literally and figuratively. I located sources for carpet scraps and went dumpster diving, researched the best polyethylene source, made contact with tree companies for the wood chips, and took a soil-building workshop. Roughly a third of the
Poly and wood chips
garden is not contaminated, so I weeded and watered the chard and lettuces planted there. In the areas of mild contamination, I planted sunflowers and cabbage. I had my family tested for lead, and thankfully we were all safe and had low blood lead levels. The news that all of our work in the garden over the last year, the rolling around in lead-infused mud, did not hurt my children actually buoyed my spirits back into optimistic, we-can-do-this mode.
Chris and I got the carpet and poly layers down ourselves in June, and we then asked our wonderful friends for a “work party” to help us cover the space with wood chips. We are lucky to live in a community that has formed a “team approach” to larger household tasks; you help us with our wood chips, we will help you paint in preparation for your move or strip carpet off of hardwood floors in your living room. As a team, we could accomplish (and did accomplish!) in one day what would take me three weeks to do alone. After the wood
Garden with wood chips
chip phase, Chris began building the cold-frame raised beds. We will have raised beds throughout the garden, but we are starting with coldframes so that we can grow some this winter. Our neighbor had old windows (without the wood frames, usually painted with lead paint) that he gave to us, so Chris built frames for each window. This is where we are now at the time of writing this blog entry: building cold-frames and re-building beds (in the uncontaminated part) so that we can experiment with double-row-covers to grow greens and other cold hearty veggies in the ground. We plan to plant garlic this fall, again (last season’s yield was covered over). Mostly we will be building beds and building soil. We have plans to build another retaining wall, smaller than last year.
The first moral of this story is: test your soil for lead and other heavy metals before you invest (financially, emotionally) in an area of your yard. Even if you think it is impossible that you have contamination, still test your soil. You never know. And don’t just test in one spot, take several tests over the entire area you will be using to grow consumables. Part of our garden is uncontaminated. Part of it is really contaminated. Take the time to educate yourself about lead paint in soils. Do you garden near your house and your house is older than 1970? You probably have a lead problem. Do you garden within 15 feet of a road? You certainly have a lead problem. Are you gardening where there was an old garage or outbuilding that was torn down? You have a lead problem. Has your old house ever had a fire? The air can carry burned and airborne lead paint into areas away from your house and contaminate your soil. Do you live in an inner city and garden on a vacant lot? You have a lead problem, no doubt about it.
I guess the second moral to this story is, don’t despair, even though that is precisely what I did at first. This is fixable. You can remediate, and it is far better to know than to consume foods (and give kids food) with lead in it.
The third moral of this story is that self-sufficiency is a process, rather than a single accomplishment. Even if lead had not been an issue, my tomato and potato crop would have failed this year because of late blight. We would not have been self-sufficient in those staple crops, and probably not in many, many other things as well. This season was challenging even for well-seasoned farmers with much more skill under their belt than I will ever possess. But we can take some joy in the fact that we are learning a great deal from this experience, and hey… we are self-sufficient in jalapenos. That is something, right?
