## 1 Introduction  
Among the soils in the area of anthropogenic impact of urbanization pressure as well as modification by use, there are soils developed in home and allotment gardens. Due to their location within cities, they are part of green areas, used by the owners for growing vegetables, which is the reason for modifying the soil profile [1, 2, 3]. The effect of these changes is the modification of humus horizon into a much deeper in the soil profile, which is characterized by a well-developed large amount of organic substance, characterized by an extensive sorption complex and far-reaching possibilities of retaining not only desirable but also toxic substances [4, 5]. This induced many scientists to study the content of heavy metals in horticultural soils [2, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Due to location of the gardens, they are also treated as urban areas, and most research focuses on agglomerations where the impact of anthropopressure is significant. However, it is worth paying attention to smaller cities, where the impact of urbanization occurs, but to a lesser extent. Hence, there was a need to conduct research in the area of the eastern-southern city of Poland, especially as they represent primarily agricultural areas and so far have been ignored in the literature on the subject.  
An important aspect of the research is to show the combination of two anthropogenic factors influencing the state of the natural environment in cities. Horticultural use contributes not only to the modification of soil-forming processes, but also changes in the concentration and forms of heavy metals in soils. In determining these changes are helpful the pollution indicators widely discussed in the literature, such as Igeo or the concentration coefficient, reflecting the distribution of heavy metals in the profile. Moreover, it is worth noting that in the literature, there are few publications describing the problem of metal decomposition in the profile with the use of indicators, where data showing the geochemical background are used, which is more practical than using reference values. Typically, the reference values based on literature data are used, which do not fully reflect the natural geochemical status of a given location [9,10]. The indicators presented in the paper are based on the results obtained from the entire profiles, which is an additional value of the research, especially new aspect of research in cities smaller than agglomerations.  
The study used the analysis of the BCR sequential extraction procedure, which is of great importance in presenting the fractional distribution of metals and indicating the content of bioavailable forms. This is important from the perspective of man and biocenosis [11,12]. However, this analysis may reveal the consequences of the soil-forming processes taking place, caused by an anthropogenic factor, which is horticulture. The fraction related to the organic substance is in this case an indicator of the connection of anthropogenic factors and the path of contamination movement. In the case of the presented work, an example is copper.  
With the objective of contributing information about the anthropogenic sources such as the horticultural use and urban pressure on soils, the following aims of the research were formulated: (i) estimation of Cu content in soils with different particle composition from urban gardens, in comparison with soils from arable fields located outside city limits, using various contamination indices and of bioavailable forms of copper, (ii) determination of the distribution of Cu in the soil profile, in particular with emphasis on organic matter-bound forms, by means of the BCR sequential extraction procedure [11,12].