All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

April showers bring May flowers, but what do May flowers bring?

Potentially lead poisoning, if you can believe it.

The National Gardening Association reports that vegetable and flower gardens are sprouting up all over the country, and particularly in urban areas.

This year alone, 7 million households say they'll plant seeds in new gardens. The Obamas already did!

But experts say that before you dig in, and start to enjoy all the fruits and vegetables of your labor, you'd better get your soil tested first.

As the New York Times reported, paint chippings and old pesticides may be buried inside, raising the levels of lead in the soil.

The tests are inexpensive, and some local health departments do them for free or just for a few bucks.

Once you're in the clear, Mary Mary Quite Contrary, plant away! And when asked "how does your garden grow," tell them it's healthy, green and lead free.

That's a page from my notebook.


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Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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Jeffrey Weidenhamer comes across as a mild-mannered, matter-of-fact chemistry professor from Ashland University in Ohio, but get him started on the amount of lead in products on store shelves today, and you'll begin to hear a combination of the urgency, disappointment and frustration in his measured voice.

On top of the courses he teaches, he has been cajoling grad students and volunteers to come in on Saturdays and help him test for high levels of lead in the trinkets, metal jewelry and plastic toys that he finds all too readily available in the cheapest discount stores around him.

His sadness flows from the fact that his ad-hoc group is perhaps able to spend more time testing all these products than the Consumer Products Safety Commission — an agency which has been complaining to congress on its antiquated facilities, limited resources, low levels of staffing and inability to nab every dangerous product landing on U.S. shores.

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