Watering Plants in Space with Mark Weislogel (GotG29)

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.)

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

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.

Transpiration and evaporation

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

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?

Back in 2014, I bought some seeds that had been into space. They are cinnamon basil (Ocimum basilicum Cinnamon), still sealed into their space packet. 

Header image: Rendering of Tiangong Space Station in late July 2022, along with June 2022 with Tianhe core module in the middle, Wentian lab module on the left, Tianzhou cargo spacecrafts on right, and Shenzhou-14 crewed spacecraft at nadir. Image credit Shujianyang via Wikipedia.

In 2020, Morgan Irons made space exploration history when she sent the first Earth soils to the International Space Station. Morgan joins Emma the Space Gardener to talk about the importance of soil structure on Earth, why she sent soil into space, and how we might develop living soils on Mars.

In this latest episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with Dr Christina Johnson, who works with microgreens at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. She explains the benefits and challenges of growing microgreens in orbit, and what it’s going to take to get them onto astronaut menus.

NASA will soon be growing chillies on the International Space Station. Jacob Torres joins Emma the Space Gardener to talk New Mexico chiles in space, his Space Chile Challenge citizen science project, and more!