Emma Doughty

Header image: Lettuce in a grow room. Image credit: University of Western Australia (UWA).

In 1971, NASA astronaut Stuart Roosa, a former US Department of Agriculture Forest Services smoke jumper, carried tree seeds into lunar orbit during the Apollo 14 mission. The The US Department of Agriculture Forest Services grew those seeds into seedlings, and the distributed the resulting ‘Moon Trees’ to national monuments and dignitaries around the world, with a large number distributed as part of the United States Bicentennial events.  

STS-78 was the fifth Life and Microgravity Spacelab Mission (LMS) and involved space shuttle Columbia, five NASA astronauts and two international astronauts – Jean-Jacques Favier (CNES) and Robert Thirsk (CSA). 

Exciting news from NASA – the space agency has selected the first science experiments designed for astronauts to deploy on the surface of the Moon during Artemis III (currently planned for 2026) – and one of them will grow plants!

Ryan and I are big fans of Who Gives a Crap, the certified B Corp that supplies our eco-friendly toilet roll. So I was thrilled this morning to discover that they’re setting their sights a lot higher, and developing a mission to send toilet paper to Uranus!*

Gardeners of the Galaxy friend Wieger Wamelink and his research team at Wageningen University & Research and the B.A.S.E. project investigate how we can create a circular and sustainable agricultural ecosystem for food production… on the Moon or Mars.

Hello, Gardeners of the Galaxy! It’s time for a new episode, and our Mission Specialist for this one is Patrick Grubbs, who recently completed a Professional Science Master’s degree in Controlled Environment Agriculture at the University of Arizona. Patrick is one of the people behind the Space Ecology Workshop, an annual virtual symposium on bioregenerative life support, space agriculture, closed ecological systems, and more. He also co-founded The Spring Institute for Forests on the Moon, an international non-profit research organization developing closed ecological life support technology and working to democratize space access in underrepresented countries. The Spring Institute is working on some really exciting astrobotany projects, and Patrick is here to tell us about… some of them!

My garden is gone.

Jessica Atkins of Texas A&M University and Sara Oliveira Santos at Brown University have published preliminary results suggesting that commonly used gardening techniques could help grow chickpeas on the Moon.

Last week, I showed you the Turkish astrobotany investigations flying on the Axiom 3 Private Space Mission, which launched to the International Space Mission yesterday. The plant experiments are part of a larger research program for the mission, much of which focuses on human biology and medical research. 

In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with Marshall Porterfield, Professor of Biological Engineering & Space Biophysics at Purdue University, who offers up some highlights from his long career in space science. During a stint as Division Director for Space Life and Physical Sciences at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. Marshall oversaw the Human Research, Physical Sciences, and Space Biology Programs including research and engineering assets at six NASA centres. He established the first open science, and advanced integrated omics research programs including NASA GeneLab and the NASA Twins Study.

Header image: An illustration of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft approaching the International Space Station for docking. Image credit: NASA

A light-hearted weekend art project: making some of the pink fir apple potatoes I grew this year look like asteroids!

Did you know that the Gardeners of the Galaxy podcast has a Patreon? It’s one of the main ways that my rocket boosters can support the show financially, and give me more time to work on it.

Agro-tech manufacturer GreenOnyx has announced its flagship product, Wanna Greens®, the natural fresh Wolffia vegetables that surpass any traditional greens, made history as the first duckweed plant to rocket into space* on SpaceX to the International Space Station (ISS).

Header image: Nicotiana benthamiana seedlings growing in simulated lunar soil in a laboratory at the China Agricultural University in Beijing. Image credit: Yitong Xia via REUTERS. 

According to the China Global Television Network, the vegetable cultivation experiment carried out by Chinese astronauts during the Shenzhou-16 mission to the Tiangong space station has yielded a good harvest, verifying the reliability of its plant growth technology in space.

Header image: An artist’s depiction of a fictional Mars colony, with solar arrays and underground greenhouses. Image credit: NASA

Header image: UK astronauts Rosemary Coogan, John McFall and Meganne Christian. Image credit: UK Space Agency

Header image: ESA’s Large Diameter Centrifuge (LDC) running at full speed. Image credit: ESA –A. Le Floc’h

In the summer of 1863, a world-famous English botanist was pondering why the shoots of climbing plants twirl around as they grow. In this episode, join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores the fascinating world of plant movement, and what that has to do with the first plants that ever flew on NASA’s space shuttle.

Please excuse any unusual website shennanigans – Ryan and I are dealing with a case of copyright infringement. (Again.)

The current crew (Shenzhou-16) on China’s Tiangong space station are growing a crop of lettuce. This video shows them watering the crop (from the bottom).

On 8 September 2023, Virgin Galactic’s ‘Galactic 03’ mission flew three tourists to the edge of space. The news that one of them  (Tim Nash) carried a pocketful of priceless hominin bones has caused a backlash from the scientific community, due to their being both irreplaceable artefacts and human ancestral remains.

Header image: The Expose-R2 facility outside the International Space Station. Image credit: Roscosmos.

China Central Television has produced a short video showing the plant experiments growing on the Tiangong space station. The Shenzhou-16 crew has been in orbit for almost three months, and says their space vegetable garden has given a good lettuce harvest.

‘Potato Pete’ was a cartoon character from the WW2 era, whose job was to persuade people to fill up on homegrown potatoes rather than bread made from imported wheat. Potatoes made it into all kinds of recipes during the war, replacing some of the fat in pastry and even turning into dessert. The Ministry of Food published the Potato Pete Recipe Book, which you can read online.

After a couple of years living in the wasteland that was my allotment, my lavender plant has gone a little wayward and woody. The rosemary is the same way, really. They should have had an annual chop after flowering, to keep them nice and fresh. It’s possible that some serious remedial pruning later in the summer will shock them into more appropriate behaviour – but it’s not guaranteed. The garden wouldn’t be the same without rosemary and lavender (their flowers and their scents, their lovely flavours), but they’re easy plants to replace if they get out of control. (There’s nothing inherently wrong with a big, bushy lavender or rosemary, I just don’t have the space to let them grow.)

This summer, we will be focusing on the main garden. The aim is to have the structure in place by the end of the year, so I can spending next year gardening rather than building the garden. It’s not that it hasn’t been an interesting experience, and I’m loving watching the design unfold and become the garden we want, but I’ve spent far more of the year wanting to garden than I will spend actually gardening!

On my birthday this year I sowed seeds for some cool chillies – chilli varieties developed for flavour, not heat. Due to the garden not being ready, I wasn’t able to plant them out until the end of June. They had a west-facing spot, with plenty of afternoon sun and the warmth of the house wall behind them. Mostly they thrived, and were trouble-free plants. I had to stake them, and water them when I watered the rest of the garden, but for the most plant they got on with life without me.

When we first moved into this house we had the sofa by the patio doors. At some point during the intervening two years we moved it to the other end of the living room, facing away from the garden, so that Ryan could have a corner for his ‘office’. It means we miss on on seeing a lot of the antics of the wild birds we entice into the garden with the feeders, which is a shame. In an ideal world we’d have a conservatory, but unfortunately it would take up too much of the garden. We’re pondering whether to move things around again, but in the meantime we need to make more of an effort to look out the window!

More and more these days, the media is full of stories of superfoods – usually fruits with high concentrations of antioxidants. The blueberry led the superfood charge, but has been left behind by newer and more exotic rivals, such as acai berries, goji berries and the yumberry.

After another weekend working hard in the garden, it looks very different again. Ryan was working on Saturday, so I spent the morning outside. The first thing I did was erect my new raised bed cover, which would have been easier had it not been a bit breezy! But I got there in the end. It’s basically a plastic cold frame that fits over the top of my raised beds. It has nice long anchor pegs to hold it down, and is now being used to harden off plants before they go outside, and protect my brassica seedlings (I bought Flower Sprouts and Purple Sprouting broccoli from the garden centre; now I have to spend the summer protecting them from every pest in the known universe!).

Outside of the tropics, the only place you’re likely to see a cocoa tree (Theobroma cacao, the trees that give us chocolate) is in a heated greenhouse at the botanical gardens. They can be grown as house plants, and seeds germinate easily when they’re fresh, but their size, their requirement for heat and the fact that you need two plants for pollination means that they’re unlikely to bear fruit. And even if they did, the process of turning cocoa beans into chocolate is a long one.

For my Masters dissertation last year I did some research into gardeners who choose to grow unusual edible crops. I settled on two species to investigate, achocha and oca. In the past I’ve written about how to grow achocha – it’s a nice, easy plant and in a temperate climate you should have no problems getting a significant yield. You may have more of a problem dealing with the glut….

It’s Sunday morning, and Ryan is still asleep, and I got a bit bored and started playing around with one of those “blog title generators”. (For those of you for whom this is a new concept, they generate click-bait style headlines for a topic you give them.)