Space Chiles with Jacob Torres

Chaz Dykes | Design: Better Homes & Gardens

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.)

Word by Matt de Neef, The Conversation

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps the latest space plant news and then talks about some of the seeds with space stories.

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

Climb the cast-iron steps to the roof garden at the Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC) and you can almost forget that you’re in the heart of the city. Just 30 by 6 metres, the garden manages to fill every vista and the breeze through the trees drowns out all but the loudest city noises.

Over our heads, on the International Space Station, chilli peppers are blooming and being hand-pollinated by astronauts.

Myrtle (Myrtus communis) is a plant that has been on my ‘to grow’ list for years now, although it has yet to make an appearance in the garden. In the UK it is often grown as an ornamental plant, an evergreen shrub up to 3m in height and width. Given a spot in full sun and well-drained soil, it produces pink buds that open into white flowers with multiple gold-tipped stamens, followed by blue-black berries. It is hardy down to -10°C, and in mild areas can be grown as a hedge as it tolerates regular clipping. The species has the most frost tolerance; some of the named varieties are less hardy, but there are also smaller varieties that will tolerate being in a container long term, and so can be moved into more sheltered accommodations for the winter.

Header image: Purple microbial mats offer clues to how ancient life functioned. Pieter Visscher, CC BY-ND

I found some time (and a blackbird-free window!) to spend in the garden yesterday afternoon. After pottering around looking after my seedlings, and repotting my salmonberry, I had to do some watering. April has been uncharacteristically dry, I don’t think we’ve had any rain to speak of this month. Everything in a raised bed is doing OK, but things in containers were starting to wilt.

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!

Join Emma the Space Gardener in the Gardeners of the Galaxy time machine to learn about the time that NASA encouraged schoolchildren all over the world to grow killer mutant space tomatoes. That can’t be right, can it?