Test results are in! The area around our house tested 1704 ppm!!!!! Way too high! The asparagus bed was 308 and the vegetable bed were 145 ppm (low) - Moral of the story: GET YOUR SOIL TESTED FOR LEAD!!

Wow. I read somewhere that sunflowers are good at leaching lead out of soil.

Thanks for the heads up mersiepoo! We moved everything away from the house just to be safe. Although I hate to let any yard space go fallow, we might put a wrap around deck there and sit and watch the neighbors :)....btw even though the asparagus bed tested 308 in the low range, the plants are dying also....guess they've been trying to tell us something after all

I'm not there anymore (sigh) but some of my container plants are with me here.
With containers YOU control everything. You can even work a greywater system, and if that is illeagal in your area, you can put a drain underneath them to put the 'used' water back into the municipal system. You can (if your pots are big enough) use a shovel and put kitchen compostables in the containers just by digging a hole (you can also freeze the compostables in a tough plastic bag in a funnel-them unpeel the bag and jam the pointed frozen compost in the dirt and put a flat stone on top).
Blueberries are great. Raspberries (I like Caroline, Dinkum, and Autumn Raspberries best) are also good and you can trellis them. I had raspberries from the above cultivars in New Orleans in containers! Onions are very easy; you get a sprouting onion or garlic clove and jam it into the soil, then use the green tops as they come out. This is especially nice with expensive shallots.
Malabar spinach, purple mustard, sweet potato-all are things I've done in containers. Just watch out for the sweet potato - the dang thing takes over all the dirt with its greedy tubers.

Love2garden2,

Hopefully the sunflowers can help with the lead problems, yeech! I'd plant them for a year or so and then see if the lead level is still the same or not. Might also want to check the PH levels, it may be too acidic, I think that asparagus likes a higher ph maybe? Sorry to hear about your lead. I hope it can help. I checked this link out, seems like sunflowers may do the job for you!

Here is a link that might be useful: sunflowers and lead

Thanks so much for the link about sunflowers! I think I will try this approach now. It's sounds sensible to me. I really love this forum 'cause not everyone understands the need to plant edibles everywhere. My backyard is finally starting to make fruits and we look forward with great anticipation to the coming summer. Mersiepoo, how's it going in PA? Thanks again!

I'm glad you can use it! I hope it works, I had remembered reading about sunflowers leaching lead out of the soil a long time ago in some herb book I had.

Just to be safe, don't eat the sunflowers, and I wouldn't compost them 'cuz it'll just put the lead in the compost pile.

It's so cool to see the fruits of your labor come into being...hopefully someday I'll beat the deer to the plums (last year they ate the plums right off the tree). I'm putting up barricades to keep the deer from eating everything else I grow, luckily they usually leave my raspberries alone, as well as my herbs. :)

Everything is going okay in Pa! Stuff is leafing out again after our late frost (after we had that 80 degree weather in April). Crazeee weather!

I'm still searching for bees, since we didn't get any appleblossoms this year, they haven't been around as much. None on the dandelions that I could see.