Seeds of Health: Safer Soils for Growing Food

Community and backyard gardens created in residential areas provide people with opportunities to improve the overall quality of their lives. Community gardens provide numerous health benefits, including improved access to nutritious food, increased physical activity and improved mental health, and can promote social health and community cohesion.These gardens are often located on properties with decades of history resulting in contamination of soils or soils of poor quality for growing food. Understanding the properties of soils, the presence of toxicants in the soil and improvements that can be made can improve the health of the soils, and by extension, the health of people growing the food. During this webinar, Drs. Drohan and Heiger-Bernays will focus on steps to take to understand the soils in your garden, interpretation of test results and best practices for current and future gardeners that are practical, timely, cost effective and easily implemented, while maximally protecting public health. It will address the issue of toxicants such as PFAS in biosolids/compost and include information on growing food in Rust Belt cities.

This webinar is part of a series organized by CHE and the Boston University Superfund Research Program (BUSRP). Learn more about the CHE-BUSRP Partnership.

Click here for more information and to register.