Alfalfa may be the first crop to grow on Mars

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.

In Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs I talk about the journeys plants have made with us – crisscrossing the globe and leaving Earth entirely for missions in space.

While we’re waiting for Tim Peake to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin his Principia mission, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the first Briton in space – Helen Sharman, who was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in 1991.

This is what the wild, self-seeded comfrey plant outside my front door looked like last week. It doesn’t look like that now, though, because I have cut it back and put the leaves to rot in one of my comfrey buckets (they have lids and taps). First, though, I had to empty out the last lot of comfrey liquid. I can’t remember when I made it – I don’t think it was last year, I think it must have been before that – and I harvested 3 litres of comfrey liquid from my pair of bucket. That’s certainly enough to keep my tomatoes and peppers happy this year!

A few weeks ago I received a press release from Waitrose about their new Alan Titchmarsh gardening range. It’s a fairly routine set of offerings, all nicely packaged up. The one that caught my eye was their ‘Broadfen’ horseradish thong, which they said is a “heritage variety first grown by the Egyptians (1500 BC).”

From the moment humans started to reach for the skies, we have used other species from Earth to test what’s safe and what happens to life away from its natural habitat on the planet’s surface. 

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps important spacecraft Arrivals and Departures and learns about growing nutrients and medicines in space. There’s a new plant experiment running on the International Space Station, and exciting news from ESA.

Just about the entire northern hemisphere is in the grip of a prolonged heatwave, with wildfires raging and people dying. There’s disagreement on how much climate change is to blame, but a consensus that damaging heatwaves will become more frequent, and we really ought to do some planning for that now – changing the way that houses are built, and planting (and retaining) more trees and green spaces, for a start. Personally, I don’t do at all well in the heat. This week I have almost become a hermit, venturing outside only when entirely necessary. Ryan and I take it in turns to water the garden in the evening, and that’s pretty much all the attention it’s getting. I planted up a bed or basil and parsley on 11th July, and have just managed to keep some of the plants alive – one or two even look like they might be getting the hang of life now – but I have some climbing pea seedlings that really want to be planted out, but would scorch in about 5 seconds.

Ever since we watched Away, Ryan and I have a new toast: “To Mars”. Unlike that fictional crew, we have no hope of ever reaching the red planet. But there are an increasing number of days when I think it would be nice to leave humanity’s mess behind and start afresh on a new world. But the prospect of forming a colony elsewhere in the solar system is a long way off, and when people talk about life on Mars they’re usually referring to alien life. 

The idea that we should be gardening without using peat is not a new one, at least here in the UK. I have a copy of ‘Gardening Without Peat’, published by Friends of the Earth in 1991. It explains that our exploitation of peat bogs is using up peat faster than it is being formed – we should consider it a non-renewable resource. The destruction of the peat bogs is causing a decline in biodiversity and allowing carbon dioxide to escape into the atmosphere to add to our climate woes.

Header image: Terrae Novae destinations: Mars. Credit: ESA–Olivier Pâques

Whilst April was a washout, May has seen some far nicer weather – particularly at the weekends! So it was time to dust off the bbq and our outdoor cooking skills and try cooking and eating outside once more.