Healing City Soils: Understanding & Addressing Soil Contamination

Soils can build up heavy metals and other pollutants over time from a range of sources — including industry, transportation, construction materials, and unsustainable land use practices. The first step to any urban agriculture project is getting to know the ground beneath your feet by assessing soil health, identifying potential contaminants, and taking steps to improve soil quality.The Compost Education Centre's Healing City Soils program offers free soil testing for urban food growers to analyze heavy metal concentrations and their bioavailability in the region's soils, and create a virtual soil map of the Capital Regional District to highlight areas where heavy metal contamination may need to be addressed before growing food.

Topics covered in this workshop:

• An introduction to soil contamination

• Potential sources of heavy metal contamination in urban soils

• How to get your soil tested through the Healing City Soils program and understanding your test results

• Best practices for growing food in or near soil that may have low-to-moderate levels of heavy metal contamination.

Presenter bio:
Martyna Tomczynski is the Manager of the Compost Education Centre’s Healing City Soils Program and has been involved with the program in various capacities since 2019. She holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Practice from Royal Roads University and is registered with the BC Institute of Professional Agrologists. She brings multidisciplinary experience spanning academia, government, and the non-profit sector, where she has supported applied research in agricultural best management practices, ecological restoration, and ecosystem information technology. Passionate about soil health, Martyna is dedicated to helping people take action in their own backyards and inspiring communities to build self-sufficiency and sustainability through urban agriculture.

The information contained in this workshop was developed by Dr. Danielle Stevenson, a multidisciplinary applied environmental scientist with 15 years of experience in research, design, implementation and management of food, agriculture, waste and remediation projects. Danielle is the founder and director of D.I.Y. Fungi (since 2012) offering mycological education, consultation, mushroom cultures, and mycoremediation and waste management research in North America and beyond. Danielle has a PhD in Environmental Toxicology from the University of California, Riverside, where she studied fungi in soil remediation and sustainable agriculture. She is also founder and advisor to the Healing City Soils project, and a board member with CoRenewal and the Association for Women in Science (Riverside). Danielle is passionate about science communication and community science and her collaborative projects bridge fields and disciplines from art, ecology, soil science, policy, toxicology and remediation, not unlike the mycorrhizal fungi she studies which bridge plant communities.

How to register for this event

You must pre-register for this event. You can obtain a free ticket through Eventbrite. You can also register for the event by calling our office at 250 386 9676 or via email by contacting [email protected]

VERY IMPORTANT: Please be in touch if you are no longer able to attend but hold a ticket so we can make your space available to someone else.

If you have benefited from this free program or plan to get your soil tested by the program in future years, please consider supporting the Compost Education Centre and Healing City Soils by making a one-time donation, or becoming a member. Support from our communities is crucial to keeping programs like these affordable and free for all!

The Compost Education Centre is a non-profit organization providing composting, waste diversion, and ecological gardening education to CRD residents. Visit our website to learn more and find other opportunities to get involved in our work.
The Compost Education Centre is located on unceded and occupied Indigenous territories, the land of the Lekwungen people— specifically the Kosapsum and Songhees Nations. These nations are two of many, made up of individuals who have lived within the porous boundaries of what is considered Coast Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Kwakwa'wakw Territory (Vancouver Island) since time immemorial. At the CEC we seek to respect, honour and continually grow our own understandings of Indigenous rights and history, and to fulfill our responsibilities as settlers, who live and work directly with the land and its complex, vital ecologies and our diverse, evolving communities.

Compost Education Centre memberships get you free workshops, discounts at garden centres around town and more great perks! Sign up or learn more on our website.

Accessibility Information:

The Compost Education Centre site has flat paths made of woodchips. The strawbale learning classroom is accessed via a wooden ramp and has a wide double door and a ramp leading up to it. Once inside everything is flat.

There is a single-stall gender neutral washroom on site. The washroom is not wheelchair accessible. There is a steep ramp from the wood chip pathway onto the washroom boardwalk, and a 2-inch step up from the washroom boardwalk into the washroom.

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