Fallout gardening tips an other information

[link to www.nuc.berkeley.edu]

For those of you who like me are worried about fallout from Fukushima.

I found this webpage last night from university of Berkeley in California. Below is an excerpt from the page which I think is informative and useful.

Unfortunately the page is a little unorganized but if you are prepared to do some digging there is quite a bit of info and several links that might help too.

The link at the top will take you to the site. I posted it again at the bottom with another link I found helpful. I believe the info is a little dated but it is still helpful.


1) Almost all produce we buy in the spring-summer-fall months (I live in Ontario) is going to come from North America, and except for hot-house tomatoes or cucumbers it’s all grown outside anyway. As we’ve seen from reports here, contamination is spreading equally from Alaska to Florida. Therefore, wherever produce is grown in North America it’ll be exposed to the same amount of fallout.

2) Therefore, if I can grow my own food in my backyard and take modest steps to minimize contamination, it’ll be cleaner than food purchased from California, Florida, or Ontario.

3) Not consuming produce, or eating only canned food, is not an option, as that’s far less healthy. I saw a study many years ago that compared the relative health affects of eating produce with heavy pesticides (e.g. from Mexico) vs not eating it at all, and the obvious answer was confirmed: better to take your veggies with a dose of poison, than not eat your veggies at all.

4) To make my produce as healthy as possible, I’m: growing leafy vegetables under greenhouse plastic; watering with municipal water rather than rainwater as that will be slightly less contaminated; favoring root veggies over leafy where possible, as soil will also filter out many particles; and growing lots of anti-oxidant veggies like broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts (my kids hate me!).

5) For drinking and cooking water, use only reverse osmosis (RO). It’s quite cheap — most water stores have their own RO equipment on site, treating already-cleaned municipal water, and here the cost is only about $2.50 to refill an 18-liter bottle. If you keep these bottles in the cool and dark, the water will remain potable for at least two years, so it’s a cheap investment to put a dozen of these big bottles down in your basement, write the date on them, and rotate your stash once a year. I’ve done my research, and RO removes most iodine and cesium. If you have $500 or so, you can get your own equipment that will *also* clean the water with activated charcoal, giving you quite pure water.

6) Whether you have your own RO system or are using municipal water, spend another $100 or so to lay a network of drip-irrigation tubes to each plant, which will allow you to give them only clean water, and will use far less water than a sprinkler or hose. It’s fun to set up drip irrigation, like building adult Lego, plus it can make the watering a breeze — plug the hose into the main inlet pipe, turn it on, come back in an hour and it’s done.

7) Keep rainwater off the garden as much as possible to minimize long-term accumulation: cover the soil with tarps when it’s not growing season, and add a couple inches of fresh compost and garden soil each new year.

And finally, compost everything you can, including biodegradables like paper napkins, in a covered compost bin and reuse that compost in next year’s garden.

[link to www.nuc.berkeley.edu]

[link to vesica.org]