Tiered Pot Garden

Haha. I realized this. There was no way around using "pot" in the title... it is what it is.

Maybe more people will read it now

I have some local neighbors who keep chickens and collect water off their roofs and make bamboo fences around their garden, and get robbed fairly frequently. They live up the street. I suggested that they get steel bars for their doors and windows and cut the shrubbery around their homes, for which I feel they considered me a fascist.

They get the electric connected services that call the security company and cops after someone has broken in.

I think gardens are great and keep meaning to get around to cutting the eyes out of potatoes and putting them in dirt filled stacks of tires, but aint got to that yet.

Meantime in the area of urban farming, chickens, and all that, the transit youths influenced by the locals up that way laid down pressure treated 6" by 6"s and are growing stuff in their containment plots.

Pressure treated wood is typically full of Arsenic and Copper. The newer PT wood is heavier on the copper than it used to be, with some cutback on the arsenic.

Far as I knew one ought not eat anything grown within a foot and a half of PT wood, as it was, up to a couple of years ago.

How far from poisonous wood is safe now to grow with the new poisonous wood?

My neighbors were also irritated with me for suggesting that their children ought to not go around barefoot due to hookworms, which are the reason Southerners of the US are considered slow and stupid. They are real sweet people you know, but hookworms get up your feet and sap your energy especially if there is animal shyte around.

Sure enough we can withstand a great deal of poisons, and will get old and die anyway, but when dying one does tend to think maybe I ought not have shot myself.

Maybe you should tell your neighbors how sweet you think they are. While it is good to warn people about bad things, pestering them about it can probably get annoying. Plus, they are probably just letting their kids be kids. I wonder myself often if humans have become too germ-phobic to have built up any immunity for illnesses at all.

I remember we used our whole garden to grow potatoes a couple times. It was always fun to dig them out in the fall.

Know a guy who was just being a kid with a hatchet who hit himself in the middle of his forehead with the wrong end and lives in a home for the mentally disabled. Knew kids that tied a rope to their sister and put the rope through an eylet in the bottom of a pool and drug the girl under. On another occasion I think they tried to burn her at the stake in a pile of leafs.

Before I make any suggestions, which I do not belabor in neighborly contexts I like to know the facts. Thought you might know how far from the current pressure treated wood plants grown are safe to eat.

- it used to be for common PT wood, a foot and a half.

I think the best answer is, don't have pressure treated wood anywhere near the garden. Railway ties were popular at one time, no one thought about being poisoned by it in those days.

Copper and arsenic are common in PT wood, also pentachlorophenol was used (at least, in the past). I got a bunch of info from occupational health and safety when I was building my house, the research on pentachlorophenol was very sad. When they went to do rat studies, they were unable to find any rats that didn't have some measurable level of it in their system already. It accumulates, you can absorb it through skin as well as orally. There were babies that died from acute exposure after their clothes were washed with the overalls of someone working with the stuff. Acute or long term, likely to give you a heart attack. Goody fun. Not in my back yard!

Railway ties are not either recommended as they may well harbor invasive termites.