Michelle Obama
Sludge in the Garden
by Mike Krumboltz
New homes are full of questions and possibilities. What color to paint the walls? How to arrange the furniture? What to plant in the garden? The Obama family must have asked a lot of those same questions when they moved into the White House. However, the first lady’s dreams of growing an organic vegetable garden have been dragged down by a previous resident that refuses to leave: sludge.
Various sources within the Buzz are reporting that Michelle Obama’s organic garden has been besieged by icky goo in the ground. As a result, the veggies aren’t quite what the first lady had in mind. According to Daily Finance, the National Park Service tested the soil in the vegetable patch and found highly elevated levels of lead due to sewage used as fertilizer.
So the question is: Who to blame? While dumping sewage into the ground sounds like a crime worthy of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, the actual perpetrators were none other than the Clintons. Yep, back when Bill and Hillary were living it up in the White House, their gardening team used sewage sludge for fertilizer. The fiends!
Sounds gross, but it’s actually fairly common. However, it does mean that the highly touted organic garden will never attain organic status. The certification process doesn’t allow the use of sludge as a fertilizer substitute. And there’s another problem: If Malia and Sasha weren’t into eating their veggies before, it’s going to be that much harder to get ‘em to eat ‘em now.
http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/92869?fp=1
Comments
Was there a question in here somewhere, or where you just helping spread Mike Krumboltz’ column, LOL!
Their garden was nothing more than a publicity stunt to begin with and if it didn’t turn out right they deserve it. Organic gardening is nothing more than some nazi environmentalist idea that makes no economic or good social sense. Organic foods are no better than non organic foods. This has been proven scientifically several times. Grocers love it as it gives them much higher margins. The public gets screwed for believing this non sense.
Sewage as a fertilizer is very common for ornamental landscaping even before the Clintons were in the White house. If your property had been professionally maintained, there’s a good chance that the ornamental areas would’ve been fertilized with sewer sludge. Converting such property to a garden usually means prepping the soil hence in this case, replacing the soil with soil intended for edible gardening. I don’t know if the Obama’s did this but it would’ve been a common first step by landscapers. I would assume that the White House staff had professional landscapers to do the actual work, in which case the organic garden may be unaffected by the sludge and the article is simply an attempt to sensationalize non-news into news.
Converting such property to a garden usually means prepping the soil hence in this case, replacing the soil with soil intended for edible gardening
That toxic sewage sludge was not spread during the Obama administration but during the Clinton administration.
The same stuff is used as fertilizer on farmers’ fields. There are many communities that oppose this practice and they are in lawsuits regarding it, but the state Departments of Environmental Protection are on the side of the polluters in the lawsuits.
The practice of using that sewage sludge as fertilizer on agricultural land has public health consequences that are not being addressed.
How many more percentage points of GDP will be spent on health care to treat the consequences of use of this sewage sludge?
