This Saturday, City Slicker Farms is offering a workshop to make urban gardening safer. 

Soil can accumulate environmental pollutants, including heavy metals such as lead. Lead was a common ingredient in house paint through the 1960s, and flakes of the paint over time, could leave high levels of lead in soil.

"West Oakland is a community that's experienced a lot of contamination - both soil and heavy metal contamination as well as air pollution. That's an environmental justice issue. It's about geography and location near the ports, and it's about who lives here and environmental racism," said Julie Pavuk, backyard garden coordinator for City Slicker Farms. "People are raising their family here and people want to have gardens. Our work is to help people do that."

However, the problem is not confined to West Oakland. It's important to assess if there are heavy metals in your garden if you have small children or pregnant women eating from, or working in, the garden. There are easy, cost-effective ways to find out whether your soil has heavy metals in it - and remedies if it does.

Workshop info

From 3 to 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 2, Jennifer Gorospe of San Jose State University will offer a workshop entitled, "Got Lead? Managing Heavy Metals in your Urban Garden."  The class will be held at the Center Street Farm, on the corner of 16th and Center streets in West Oakland.

Come to this workshop to learn about the risks related to exposure to heavy metals such as lead, how to limit exposure and practice taking a soil sample so that you can test your own garden soil.

Workshops are free for low-income West Oakland residents and participants in City Slicker Farms' programs and are offered by donation for other aspiring gardeners.

To reserve a spot in a class, call (510) 763-4241 or email byg@cityslickerfarms.org.