Word by Matt de Neef, The Conversation
21.08.2023 - 11:44 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Today (May 20th) is Pick Strawberries Day in America. It’s a bit early in the UK – the strawberry season is only just beginning, ramping up to be ready for Wimbledon in June.
So, given that I’m not going to pick any strawberries from my garden today, I thought I’d look at whether astronauts will be picking space strawberries in the future.
Scientists and astronauts are getting pretty good at growing salad leaves in Veggie on the ISS and even managed a bouquet of zinnias. However, getting plants to flower and successfully grow fruit in space is still a challenge. (One that the Plant Habitat-04 experiment, growing space chiles in the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), will investigate later this year.)
However, strawberries usually feature on the crop lists put together by researchers for hypothetical space farms. The plants are compact, the fruits are sweet and tasty, and the antioxidants in berries may help protect astronauts from radiation damage.
In 2005, NASA was growing several kinds of strawberries from around the world at the Space Life Sciences (SLS) Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center. They were testing varieties to see which would best support astronaut crews physically and psychologically.
“Once they leave and are a few million miles away from Earth, anything they bring from home is going to have a huge psychological effect. For years, plants have been used as therapy. Being able to complete their tasks and then have a few hours (or minutes) to sit back and smell the aroma of fresh grown plants, smell the aroma of growing strawberries, work with them and talk with them, the benefits are just immeasurable.”
The researchers tested “short day” strawberry varieties, which can be induced to flower under low-light conditions,
Word by Matt de Neef, The Conversation
Header image: Tokyo Bekana Chinese cabbage leaves prior to harvest aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA
Wimbledon fortnight coincides with the height of the strawberry season here in the UK and the humble strawberry becomes world-famous as tennis spectators tuck into strawberries and cream in front of the cameras. This year it even looks like they’ll be able to leave their raincoats at home!
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.
Over our heads, on the International Space Station, chilli peppers are blooming and being hand-pollinated by astronauts.
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.
I’ve got a lot of new strawberry plants in my garden this year. They’re not all planted out in their final homes, so it won’t be a bumper crop, but there should be some ripe fruits for me to harvest soon enough. I’ve got several different sorts, from the tiny red and white alpine and wild strawberries to the standard garden red ones, and some intriguing framberries that are strawberries that taste like raspberries! So it will be fun to see how those turn out.
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.
Ryan’s dad likes mint sauce on pretty much anything. I grew up in a “mint sauce with roast lamb” household, so I found this slightly odd. In truth I have never cottoned on to the delights of mint sauce, so we don’t keep a jar in the house. It wasn’t until very recently that I discovered that Ryan really likes mint sauce, too.
Earlier this month, the Met Office announced that its weather radar was picking up something other than rain clouds – swarms of flying ants.
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?