The Mission

It’s at this time of year, I think, that a polytunnel or greenhouse really comes in handy in the garden. Over the summer it may just be a tangle of tomato vines – productive, but a space that you really only go in to keep up with the watering chore, or to harvest ripe tomatoes. You know you’re going to come out with green stains on your clothes and hands that smell funny – tomatoes are like that. Those tomatoes will hang on longer into the autumn than you thought they would, and by the time you’ve cleared out the polytunnel the season will be so far advanced that it will be cold and dark and your crop of overwintering salads will barely be growing – just marking time until the days are long enough for them to actually grow.

Earth Day seems to be an auspicious day on which to being a new blog series. ‘The Hive’ is going to be a collection of positive news stories about the environment, with a solarpunk vibe – demonstrating that those of us who care about the environment are not alone, and that in fact there are legions of people around the world who are actively making a difference, and who share a positive vision of how the future could look, rather than the gloom and doom of a dystopia forced on us by a broken climate.

The Pantry contains information about some of the items that are useful for a peat-free gardener, and gardening terms you may come across on your peat-free travels.

We’ve had the Hydroponicum for over a year now. It has kept us supplied with salads and stir-fry veg, and I’ve grown one or two more experimental crops as well. Not everything I have tried has been successful. My spinach bolted (I’m not sure why, and I haven’t tried again yet). Alliums don’t seem to like germinating in the hydroponic seedling tray, and coriander downright refused. Coriander seedlings will grow hydroponically, though, so I may try allium transplants at some point.

The original plant crew for the AeroGarden: Cuttings mission was garden mint, sage and rosemary. As I expected, the garden mint was the first to root, and is growing well – to the point of crowding the others out! Sage rooted second, and is putting on new growth. Rosemary was slow to root, but has now done so and is starting to show some new leaves!

At the beginning of the year, I set up a new mission in the AeroGarden, growing two peppers (Popti and Redskin) and a tomato (Veranda Red). Ten days later, I had two tomato seedlings, which I had to thin to one. The peppers were a bit slower, but by 19th January they had germinated (and been thinned) too.

In the Hi-Seas habitat in Hawaii, analog astronauts take part in simulated space missions. Ben Greaves joins Emma the Space Gardener to talk about the isolation, the dehydrated diet, and his experiment growing microgreens in space-age hydrogel.

Just over a year ago, when we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I talked about the lack of diversity in space and mentioned Mary Jackson. In 2016, the movie Hidden Figures shared the stories of Mary Jackson and two other Black female mathematicians – Katherine Johnson and, Dorothy Vaughan. They worked at NASA when a ‘computer’ still meant a person carrying out mathematical calculations. The film is based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly, which I am reading at the moment. The book offers a more detailed and accurate account of the prejudice these women (and others) had to overcome.

Thirty years ago, Helen Sharman blasted off on her Project Juno mission, becoming the first British astronaut and the first woman to visit the Mir space station. Join Emma the Space Gardener to discover how Helen was chosen for the mission, the plants she grew on Mir, and what happened to the pansy seeds she took into space.

Can we grow food on the Moon or Mars? That was the question that started Dr Wieger Wamelink, ecologist and exobiologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, on a research quest in 2013.

Not long ago, I was summing up our first two months with the AeroGarden, our ‘space garden’. I noted that, although it’s a really good way to start small batches of seedlings for the larger Hydroponicum, in its seed-starting configuration the noise it makes drove us potty.

On 21st November, the AeroGarden started making more of a noise than usual, emitting a high-pitched whine. When I showed Ryan, he immediately spotted that the pump was barely making any bubbles, and diagnosed a blockage in the aerator.