UF Space Plants Lab

The Coral Plant is a stunning tropical shrub that can add a touch of exotic beauty to any garden or indoor space. It gets its name from its attractive coral-like appearance and unique foliage!

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

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

In this NASA image from January 2020, you can see Lashelle Spencer taking measurements on ‘Red Robin’ dwarf tomato plants. Lashelle is a plant scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and this photo was taken inside the Plant Processing Area in the spaceport’s Space Station Processing Facility.

Gardeners of the Galaxy has completed its first solar orbit! Join Emma the Space Gardener for a birthday celebration and learn how GotG got started, hear the story of a space plants experiment you’ll never forget, and find out which plant Emma would choose to take into space.

Join Emma the Space Gardener on the Tiangong space station to learn about China’s botanical experiments in space, and why Chinese consumers are eagerly awaiting rice from heaven. Plus – what was the first plant grown in space?

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! Emma’s guest on the show this week is Dr Javier Medina, a Space Plant Biologist with the Spanish National Research Council. He talks about why it’s essential we grow plants in space, what we’ve learned from his experiments, and when there might be a greenhouse on the Moon!

Now that I have a couple of episodes under my belt, I am poised to have guests on my Gardeners of the Galaxy podcast. I thought it would be fun to ask each of them the same question:

When MTV launched on 1st August 1981, the first images broadcast were NASA footage of the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. MTV replayed that repurposed clip every hour for the next five years. And since it launched the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), the awards handed out have been in the shape of a Moonman.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! There’s some great news for space gardeners this week, involving space to grow in, bricks to build with and… hibernating squirrels. And you can discover how many plants it would take to provide your own personal oxygen supply, and what would make a good houseplant in space. Oh, and there’s still time to enter the chilli seed giveaway!

The December edition of the Space Boffins podcast is here, and it features me talking about space plants!