Produced by Alexandra Heinegg, Patricia Maragos, Edmund Mason, Jane Rabinowicz, Gloria Straccini and Heather Walsh

This guide is written as a primer on soil contamination, as it relates to gardening in an urban setting. It seeks to provide individual gardeners or community groups with the necessary background information to address this issue. There are several important aspects of soil contamination which are addressed in this guide, including the dangers of gardening in contaminated soil, the potential sources of contamination, ways to evaluate the level of contamination present in the soil, and your options for addressing the problem. At the end of this document there are several appendices with information pertaining to the topics discussed here. Most of these are Montreal- and Canada–specific, but should provide some good starting points for similar resources in other cities and countries.