NASA Selects 7 New Space Plant Studies

This versatile and beautiful plant has become even more fascinating to gardeners and botanists alike. Check out the Best New Zealand Flax Varieties in this article that offer unique colors, textures, and growth habits.

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.)

Header image: Chimpanzee Ham with Trainers. Image credit: NASA

This new short video from the University of Florida Space Plants Lab explains how and why they’re studying how plants react to being in microgravity.

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.

Gardeners of the Galaxy has completed its first solar orbit! Join Emma the Space Gardener for a birthday celebration and learn how GotG got started, hear the story of a space plants experiment you’ll never forget, and find out which plant Emma would choose to take into space.

Header image: Chinese astronauts Tang Hongbo, Nie Haisheng, and Liu Boming during ceremony before heading to Tiangong. ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores cultivating the cosmos, planting planets and sowing seeds in space. The second episode of Gardeners of the Galaxy includes a look at the current state of plant experiments on the International Space Station, a rundown of the missions on their way to Mars and a sneak peek at the future of space chillies. And there’s a seed giveaway too!

Welcome to a special Valentine’s edition of Gardeners off World, where love is definitely in the recycled air!

Join Emma the Space Gardener on the Tiangong space station to learn about China’s botanical experiments in space, and why Chinese consumers are eagerly awaiting rice from heaven. Plus – what was the first plant grown in space?

In 2020, Morgan Irons made space exploration history when she sent the first Earth soils to the International Space Station. Morgan joins Emma the Space Gardener to talk about the importance of soil structure on Earth, why she sent soil into space, and how we might develop living soils on Mars.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! Emma’s guest on the show this week is Dr Javier Medina, a Space Plant Biologist with the Spanish National Research Council. He talks about why it’s essential we grow plants in space, what we’ve learned from his experiments, and when there might be a greenhouse on the Moon!