Astronaut eat their veggies!

Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA 

An ideal seed compost is able to retain water, whilst at the same time letting excess water drain away to provide an environment that is damp but not waterlogged. It allows penetration of plant roots and is able to anchor plants, but has space for air. Its texture is consistent, and it is free from pests, diseases and weeds that would compete with the seedlings. As we have seen, it doesn’t need to contain many nutrients if seedlings are going to be pricked out; seedlings growing in modules will either need enough nutrients in the compost to support them through their first weeks of life, or suitable supplementary feeding.

The English obsession with grass came into being in the 17th century, when the close cut lawn was a status symbol of the rich. Only they could afford to take land out of production for purely aesthetic purposes, and maintaining a lawn before the invention of the mower was a highly skilled and labour-intensive process. The middle classes started growing lawns from the 1860s onwards, and the Victorian popularity for outdoor sports led to their proliferation. Grass species from the Old World were taken to America during this period, and the lawn took there over in the early 20th century. In 2005, NASA published research suggesting that lawns (including residential and commercial lawns and golf courses) were the single largest irrigated ‘crop’ in America, covering about 128,000 square kilometres. In 2013 there were upwards of 15 millions lawns in Britain, costing us £54 million in fertilisers and £127 million on lawn mowers.

This is a really fun video (12:24 long) from Adam Savage’s Tested series, in which a chef tries to help astronauts on the ISS eat nicer meals by combining foods they already have in stock. Chris Hadfield is their astronaut guinea pig, and demonstrates very effectively why it’s so hard to prepare meals in space!

One of the big differences between now and the time before gardeners relied so much on peat-based composts is the rise in container growing. An army of modern amateur gardeners has to put up with small gardens, and possibly with no soil at all. Growing plants in containers allows us to garden wherever we like, and even to grow plants that would not thrive in our soil. Some plants are grown in containers to keep them under control; others so that they can be moved indoors in winter to ensure their survival.

Buying plants

Clive Phillips, The University of Queensland and Matti Wilks, The University of Queensland

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: Mission specialist Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

With my bookshelf groaning under the weight of unread review books, I have declared an emergency Reading Week. Reading Week at university is a bit like half term – the lecturers get a week off teaching, and the students are supposed to use it to catch up on their reading list. When I went back to uni to do my Masters I dreamed of spending a lot of time reading, with the wealth of the university library on hand. The reality was there was never any time to ready anything that wasn’t immediately essay-related, which was a shame.

I first tried to grow tomatillos (Physalis philadelphica) in 2011. I don’t remember much about it, to be honest, but obviously I got some fruit, because I took some photos of it! Equally obviously, a lot of the fruits were left on the plants and rotted away to almost nothing, leaving a very attractive spidery case behind.

I grew up understanding the phrase “a bit Heath Robinson” as meaning something that had been cobbled together, but I wasn’t really aware of the fact that Heath Robinson was a real person. Born in 1872, he was an English cartoonist and illustrator, and he became famous for drawings of convoluted contraptions – ridiculously complicated machines that achieved things you don’t need a machine for. It was in this capacity that ‘Heath Robinson’ entered the dictionary in 1912; he became more synonymous with cobbling things together during the ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign of the Second World War. In fact, one of the automated analysis machines at Bletchley Park – a forerunner of the codebreaking Colossus – was named Heath Robinson in his honour.