Mission Patch: NROL-91

Growing vegetables is one of the best ways to use your garden because you can save yourself a lot of money, reduce your impact on the environment, and the produce that you grow will be a lot tastier than anything that you buy in a supermarket. A lot of people are put off the idea of growing vegetables because they think that it’s incredibly hard but that isn’t the case at all. While there are some varieties that are difficult to get going, there are plenty of vegetables that are really simple to grow at home.

The original plant crew for the AeroGarden: Cuttings mission was garden mint, sage and rosemary. As I expected, the garden mint was the first to root, and is growing well – to the point of crowding the others out! Sage rooted second, and is putting on new growth. Rosemary was slow to root, but has now done so and is starting to show some new leaves!

My mission is to grow new things, in new ways.

At the beginning of the year, I set up a new mission in the AeroGarden, growing two peppers (Popti and Redskin) and a tomato (Veranda Red). Ten days later, I had two tomato seedlings, which I had to thin to one. The peppers were a bit slower, but by 19th January they had germinated (and been thinned) too.

The role downunder played in helping track the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon.

In the Hi-Seas habitat in Hawaii, analog astronauts take part in simulated space missions. Ben Greaves joins Emma the Space Gardener to talk about the isolation, the dehydrated diet, and his experiment growing microgreens in space-age hydrogel.

Thirty years ago, Helen Sharman blasted off on her Project Juno mission, becoming the first British astronaut and the first woman to visit the Mir space station. Join Emma the Space Gardener to discover how Helen was chosen for the mission, the plants she grew on Mir, and what happened to the pansy seeds she took into space.

Not long ago, I was summing up our first two months with the AeroGarden, our ‘space garden’. I noted that, although it’s a really good way to start small batches of seedlings for the larger Hydroponicum, in its seed-starting configuration the noise it makes drove us potty.

Header image: A SpaceX Dragon capsule, NASA Johnson/Flickr, CC BY-NC

On 21st November, the AeroGarden started making more of a noise than usual, emitting a high-pitched whine. When I showed Ryan, he immediately spotted that the pump was barely making any bubbles, and diagnosed a blockage in the aerator.

If you look at the lists of crops that researchers suggest for space gardens and Martian farms, tomatoes are always on there. However, the first fruit NASA is aiming to grow on the ISS is a chilli pepper. I thought it would be fun to see how dwarf tomatoes and sweet peppers grow in my little space garden.

Can sending vines into space help wine production on Earth? Nicholas Gaume and Dr Michael Lebert from Space Cargo Unlimited join Emma the Space Gardener to discuss Mission WISE, and why they’ve sent both wine and vines to the International Space Station.