When moving into a new place, one of the biggest fears is inheriting a previous owner's mistake. That certainly applies to the garden.
The buyer of a new home shared their dilemma in a post to the r/vegetablegardening Reddit community, asking about the possible contamination of their garden. They questioned whether the previous owner's liberal use of rubber mulch would pollute the ground.
Upon buying, they'd found a pile of what seemed like 2-inch chunks of shredded tires painted red. They'd cleared it all into waste bags, noting that salamanders, woodlice, and spiders had taken residence in it. More ominously, "huge clumps" of discarded paper bags were also there.
The OP's concern about planting in soil once coated with rubber tire fragments was on the money.
One commenter wrote: "You had granulated rubber tires smeared all over your garden? I wouldn't grow food there. It will be filled with particulates and chemicals."
As the Redditor implies, using rubber as mulch can lead to soil pollution when the material leaches chemicals. The OP had contingency plans to dig and sift the soil to about 24 inches deep, then cover it with good-quality compost.
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Still, the community had its concerns about whether that would be sufficient to prevent the produce from being contaminated with chemicals. There were suggestions to get the soil tested, but the price of that spooked the OP. Raised garden beds were another idea, though the OP admitted it wasn't their preference.
Fortunately for this story, a user proposed a nice middle ground for the Redditor's dilemma that allowed them to plant in the ground while playing it safer ahead of a soil test.
"I would grow sunflowers or other ornamentals and see how the plants grow," a user wrote. "I say sunflowers since they can leach out toxins since they are a bio accumulator like cannabis and repair soil."
The OP was on board with this plan, and the mention of cannabis gave them a laugh as they imagined that wouldn't be well-received in their Alabama neighborhood.
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"I've decided that I'm going to both move the planned garden and test the soil at some point in the future," they revealed. "In the meantime, some sunflowers would look lovely."
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