Christiana Aretta writes a journal about food, photography, & toys.

This week is pretty much the last week to get greens into the ground for the winter. My eating greens are already planted and well established. My lead-leaching greens are still waiting patiently in the seed packets.

Lead-leaching greens, I hear you ask?

In the spring, we had the soil in our backyard tested. And the tests returned that we had some lead in the soil. Not a ton but enough to make growing leafy greens and root vegetables a bad idea. So we searched around on the internet about ways to get lead out of the soil and found this study. And this study. And this study.

If you google the words “phytoextraction”, “lead”, “spinach”, you’ll get tons more studies. Sunflowers and mustard plants are also effective at leaching heavy metals out of the soil. I thought about planting both of these during the summer but since, fruiting vegetables are less affected by lead in soil, I use my plant beds throughout the summer for tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc. The beds are free all fall, winter and spring.

Or at least they will be once I get rid of the last tomato plants and peppers. Which is tough because they keep growing flowers, attracting monarch butterflies, and churning out yummy vegetables. So I’ve managed to put it off until tomorrow.

The plus side of tearing my summer babies out of the ground will be the nice haul of green tomatoes. Green tomato chutney, all at once sour, sweet, and spicy with ginger and mustard corns provides a bright note of summer through meat heavy winter.

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