In the Novella Carpenter interview I posted yesterday, she says that lead in soil is the number one concern for urban farmers. I started getting nervous about lead in my soil and did some research. I found a few good articles on the topic:

• For Urban Gardeners, Lead Is a Concern (NYTimes.com)
• Lead in the Home Garden and Urban Soil Environment (University of Minnesota Extension)
• Children, gardens, and lead (Cornell University)

Here are a few points from those articles:

• If you live near high-traffic roads or old buildings, it might be worth getting your soil tested
• One option for dealing with leaded soil is to add lime to raise pH of soil and add organic matter, which will help bind the lead in the soil
• Another option is to just use raised beds with clean soil and compost brought in from elsewhere
• Fruit crops seem to be safer to grow in leaded soils than leaf and root crops
• At least one experiment found that growing spinach in leaded soil for three months (and discarding it) reduced the lead in the soil by 200ppm!