Off-Nominal Space Plant Experiments (GotG38)

It has been a difficult spring for gardeners, and their plants, here in the UK. If you’re lucky enough to have the space (and funds) for a greenhouse or a polytunnel then that goes a long way to protecting plants from the vagaries of the weather, but for everyone else cloches are a good solution to the problems it brings.

Buying plants

Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.

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.

“April showers bring May flowers.” English proverb

At 11 pm on Friday (BST, 18:01 EDT), SpaceX launched an uncrewed Dragon cargo spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station (ISS). This Dragon capsule has been to the ISS twice before, making it the first to fly in space for a third time. This is the 18th SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract mission for NASA: CRS-18.

Rupesh Paudyal, University of Leeds

I’m lucky enough to live reasonably close to the Earth Trust, an organisation that aims to offer people life changing experiences that reconnect them to the natural world. They have lots of free and reasonably-priced events for both children and adults, and welcome lots of school and other groups to their HQ alongside Wittenham Clumps (a lovely vantage point from which to get a good view of Didcot!). Over the weekend I went to a workshop they had organised entitled ‘Cordage and Fibres‘, which promised to show interested parties how to make rope and cord from nettle, hemp and flax. It also aimed to explain retting, scutching and heckling.

COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change, has ended with a ‘landmark’ agreement that climate change is something we all need to tackle together. Last week I was talking about what gardeners can do to reduce their carbon footprint, and a lot of it is about being thrifty with resources – something that tends to come naturally to us! Over the weekend, Ryan has done his bit by recycling plastic plant pots in my direction. He came across a newly landscaped commercial building, where the unwanted plant pots were being discarded.

An ethnobotany superhero by night, my mild-mannered daytime alter ego is a science writer for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the UK’s research councils. It’s not often that those two worlds collide, although during the early summer the campus I work on is dotted with the blooms of hardy orchids.

Hello, and welcome to Gardeners off World! On 15 February, the NG-13 cargo ship blasted off from NASA Wallops on its way to the International Space Station (ISS). It arrived on 18 February, where NASA astronaut Drew Morgan caught it with the Canadarm2 robotic arm.

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.