Kaido
Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
- Feb 14, 2004
- 47,316
- 4,293
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I inherited a Space Tomato today! Short version is NASA has been sending tomato seeds up to space for awhile now & then letting school kids grow them:
Tomatosphere™: Sowing the Seeds of Discovery through Student Science
Home base on the moon. Boot prints on Mars. Visits to asteroids. With the world’s spacefaring nations looking beyond the space station to envision human missions to increasingly distant destinations, scientists have already begun to tackle the many challenges of sending humans farther and...www.nasa.gov
Fun facts:
* The seeds were weightless for a month
* They orbited the earth 500 times
* They travelled over 10 million miles!
You Can Plant Seeds That Flew In Space!
Do tomato seeds that spend time in space grow differently than those that never left the Earth? The Tomatosphere program can help students with everything from math to teamwork. Seeds are still available!www.issnationallab.org
A local school had some sprouts from the extra space seeds looking for a home, so I added one to my LED growlight setup. I will probably 3D print a Groot planter using Wood PLA to house it in, plus I have a separate bendy growlight I can use as it gets bigger. It tickles me to know this plant grew from seeds that went to SPACE!
Also, I attended a Freight Farms training session recently, which is a company just north of me that makes hydroponic shipping container farms that can operate from -40F to 130F. You can grow 3 acres of food using 5 gallons of water per day! The system design is OUTSTANDING! Unit cost is $150k. They have over 600 installations to date, from Alaska to Dubai. The only food it can't grow is trees (ex. fruit trees) due to their size. There are lots of crop options; a single unit can produce 700 heavy heads of lettuce in just 5 weeks, year-round! (or 1,450 small heads on a 3-week schedule!) More complete crop guide here.
An update on Hector the Space Tomato: apparently LED growlights are like steroids for these things! I added some chopsticks as vertical growing guides. At this rate, I'll have to transplant him in another week, holy buckets!
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