Gardeners of the Galaxy

Tree! (It’s the Magic Number) aka GotG55

Gardeners of the Galaxy is three years old! To celebrate, Emma the Space Gardener has been delving into the archives, digging deeper into three related astrobotany stories from days gone by, which all have something to do with trees.
 
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Formidable Ferns with Emily Sessa (GotG54)

It's time for another exciting episode, and in this one Emma the Space Gardener talks with Dr Emily Sessa, the director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden. Now Emily's job might just be one of the coolest in the Universe, but she has also recently been working on some NASA-funded research that could tell us a lot about the history of life on planet Earth, but also give us some hints about how to live well on other planets.
Sign up for the Gardeners of the Galaxy: MIssion Report newsletter to get new episode alerts and bonus astrobotany content: https://emmadoughty.substack.com/.

Millets in Space (GotG53)

As 2023 is the International Year of Millets, Emma the Space Gardener explores just exactly what millets are, whether we'll ever see them growing in space, and why the International Atomic Energy Authority and the FAO just sent millet seeds into space.
 
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Duckweed in Space with Jenny Mortimer (GotG52)

In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with Dr Jenny Mortimer from the University of Adelaide, one of the scientists involved with the new Plants for Space (P4S) project. Jenny currently has a bit of an obsession with duckweed, a plant with superpowers that could be right at home in space!
Sign up for the Gardeners of the Galaxy: MIssion Report newsletter to get new episode alerts and bonus astrobotany content: https://emmadoughty.substack.com/.
 

Roses in Space (GotG51)

It's Valentine's Day on Earth, and love is definitely in the recycled air in the Orbital Garden! Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores the history of roses in space, and an art project that imagines a future for roses on Mars.
Sign up for the Gardeners of the Galaxy: MIssion Report newsletter to get new episode alerts and bonus astrobotany content: https://emmadoughty.substack.com/.

Marigolds on Moon Rocks (teaser)

 
In this teaser episodes, join Emma the Space Gardener for a trip into the astrobotany archives. In 2006, researchers published their work attempting to grow marigolds on simulated lunar regolith. But there's more to it than that....
 
Sign up for the Gardeners of the Galaxy: MIssion Report newsletter to get new episode alerts and bonus astrobotany content: https://emmadoughty.substack.com/.
 

Growing Beyond Earth (GotG50)

The last episode of 2022 is here, and it's a good one! Emma the Space Gardener has been talking with Amy Padolf and Carl Lewis from the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden about their citizen science/education project Growing Beyond Earth® (GBE). GBE is really something special, because it allows school students to collect data that influences which plants NASA grows in space.
 
Sign up for the Gardeners of the Galaxy: MIssion Report newsletter to get new episode alerts and bonus astrobotany content: https://emmadoughty.substack.com/.

Space Tomatoes and Eu:CROPIS (GotG49)

In 2018, the German Space Agency launched a particularly ambitious project on a year-long space mission - a satellite equipped with two greenhouses designed to grow tiny tomatoes at gravity levels equivalent to those found on the Moon and Mars. But it was more than just an experiment to grow plants in space. In this episode, Emma the Gardener explores Eu:CROPIS, a project to develop a biological life-support system... for tomatoes.