will my vegetables be safe to eat?

September 5, 2010 11:42 AM

Will it be safe to eat vegetables that have been grown in soil containing decorative plant fertilizer capsule / pellets?

we have recently moved into a brand new flat with a roiof terrace. the developers built some lovely big wooden planeters which they filled with not so lovely ornamental plants which had gone brown by the time we moved in due to lack of watering.

i have pulled them all up and have started to plant vegetable seeds, however i have noticed that the soil is full of small round yellow and blue plant food pellets that i assume slowly disolve and release their stuff (they kind of burst and have liquid in them when squeezed).

I know that my vegetables won't be organic, but should they be safe to eat? would decorative plants be fed with anything that i shouldn't eat nowadays.

this is in the UK.

posted by mairuzu to home & garden (4 answers total)

Yes, they're safe to eat. Why wouldn't they be?

In fact, and it may shock you to hear this, foods grown with non-organic fertilizer at the commercial scale are also safe to eat.
posted by Netzapper at 2:48 PM on September 5, 2010

synthetic fertilizers wouldn't directly make your food unsafe.

as for their role in the global industrial farm system in which a "grey" revolution (not the "green" revolution as touted) has turned millions of acres of living soil into lifeless mixes for chemical delivery that will produce nutrient-depleted plants for maximum profit...it's a whole nuther story.
posted by ecourbanist at 4:44 PM on September 5, 2010

(For an answer to "Why wouldn't they be," the bags of this kind of soil often say that it's not for growing edibles in.)
posted by fiercecupcake at 6:19 PM on September 5, 2010

the yellow pellets are simple pot plant fertilisers, they will help. The blue pellets are far, far more likely to be slug pellets. They should not come into direct contact with the leaves of what you are growing.

If you want to grow some root veg, carrots parsnips, potatoes, I would get the blue ones out or change the soil.
posted by Wilder at 6:42 AM on September 6, 2010