Chinese Astronauts Celebrate a Good Lettuce Harvest

With the charming appearance and the magnificent vibes these bring, here are the Best Shohin Bonsai Tree Pictures that will enchant you.

Join us for an exclusive conversation with presenter, broadcaster and author Alan Titchmarsh. Recorded at BBC Gardeners’ World Live, and Hosted by presenter and broadcaster, Nicki Chapman, the audience listened in as Alan discussed what it means to be a good gardener… You can buy tickets for the next live show, BBC Gardeners’ World Autumn Fair here.

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

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!

Header image: Tokyo Bekana Chinese cabbage leaves prior to harvest aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA

Good King Henry is a perennial herb in the family Chenopodiaceae – the same plant family as some familiar vegetables (including beetroot and chard), some familiar weeds (e.g. Fat Hen) and some other useful but more unusual plants – including quinoa and tree spinach.

We’ve had the Hydroponicum for over a year now. It has kept us supplied with salads and stir-fry veg, and I’ve grown one or two more experimental crops as well. Not everything I have tried has been successful. My spinach bolted (I’m not sure why, and I haven’t tried again yet). Alliums don’t seem to like germinating in the hydroponic seedling tray, and coriander downright refused. Coriander seedlings will grow hydroponically, though, so I may try allium transplants at some point.

Did you sleep well last night? You would not have felt so cosy if your mattress had been infested with bed bugs (Cimex lectularius), an ancient pest that is making a comeback in the modern world, complete with pesticide resistence. Looking for a new solution to this age-old problem, scientists from the Universities of California and Kentucky took their inspiration from reports written in the first half of the twentieth century (sadly not available online) that describe the use of bean leaves (in Eastern Europe) to trap bed bugs so that they can then be destroyed.

Space research can take you to some odd places. Siberia isn’t known for being a hospitable environment, and cosmonauts used to go into space with a gun in case something went wrong with their re-entry and they wound up having to defence themselves from bears in a Siberian forest. Even so, Russia has built a new spaceport there (Vostochny Cosmodrome), to reduce dependency on the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan.

Header image: The prototype space greenhouse developed by the TIME SCALE project showed that it is possible to recycle nutrients and water to grow food. Image credit – Karoliussen

We may not be free of frosts yet, but it seems as though spring has come at last! The trees are leafing up, buds are bursting all over the place, and the grass and the weeds are growing. Some of the blossom has been and gone already, in a hurry to catch up and get on with things.

Header image: What makes more sense: Sending a human or a robot to Mars? Credit: Juergen Faelchle/Shutterstock.com