Sustainable urban horticulture: managing soils for nutritional crops

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Our EPSRC-funded research has demonstrated that there is potentially enough land in UK urbanareas for urban horticulture (UH) to make an important contribution to UK fruit and vegetable (F&V)production 1 . Edmondson's EPSRC fellowship revealed that sustainably grown UH F&V contain lowernutrient concentrations than equivalent commercial horticultural crops. UH is widely recognised asone of the key mechanisms to increasing access to F&V for urban communities, but these resultssuggest that one unintended consequence of this maybe reducing the intake of nutrients comparedto consumption of commercial F&V.Lower nutritional content of UH F&V might be driven by dilution within plant tissues due to therelative volume of UH crops, or less consistent application of fertilisers and pesticides. Our researchhas shown that associations with mycorrhizal fungi can ameliorate nutrient dilution in crops 2 andthat unregulated organic soil amendments negatively affect the functionality of plant-beneficialfungal associations, reducing their supply of soil nutrients to the plant 3 . Together, our novel dataraise key questions about how we may sustainably expand UH across cities whilst maintainingnutrient concentrations found in commercial horticultural crops.