Space-age crops: Red Robin tomatoes

Growing onions is a popular task for millions of gardeners and knowing when to harvest red onions – along with yellow and white varieties – is important for success. If you harvest onions too early, it means a limited storage life. But, harvesting too late could mean a split or rotten bulb. In this article, I’m going to review two perfect times for harvesting red onions. One is ideal for fresh use and the other is best for optimizing storage life.

Looking forred plants for aquarium? While people think that these bright Red Aquarium Plants are only reserved for experienced growers, there are plenty of options out there for beginners as well! Here are some of the best red aquarium plants!

How does a kitchen gardener choose what to grow? It’s about balancing quite a complex set of variables, which include the space and time available, the local climate and soil, the gardener’s skill level and what they like to eat. That last one is, itself, quite a complicated topic as culture plays a significant role. There are many thousands of edible plants on the planet; most people only eat a small number and grow fewer still.

Briardo Llorente, Macquarie University

Word by Matt de Neef, The Conversation

When Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22 flew into space on Sunday, it carried one billionaire passenger and three tubes filled with plants.

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.

The red planet. It may hold no life, but is it dead? [Image credit: NASA/JPL]

Just over 3 weeks ago, I started the AeroGarden on its latest mission – rooting herb cuttings. Unsurprisingly, the mint was the first plant to take root, which it did in under a week.

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.

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

The media likes to say we’re in a second space race, or the second space age, referring to the commercialisation of space exploration. Personally, I prefer my Second Space Sage.