🖖 Plants grown from moondust

Did you hear about this? 

So lunar colonies are just around the corner. And those colonists will need to eat while they’re out there. They can’t rely on quarterly resupplies like the International Space Station (ISS).

They’ll need to grow their own food.

The problem?

The moon doesn’t have dirt like we do on Earth. 

Dirt is a mix of rock, clay, sand and some minerals. There’s a variety of decomposed organic matter which adds microbes and moisture.

Plenty of nutrients for plants.

The moon has regolith. 

It’s a dust- a mixture of meteor bits and asteroids that have pummelled the lunar surface over 100s of millions of years.

And no moisture.

Not much food for plants.

Well a team out of Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences combined our terrestrial dirt with lunar regolith and grew…

Chickpeas!

They grew these legumes in mixtures up to 75% lunar dust. 

Ain’t that cool?

The secret lies in adding fungi and worm…poop. This makes a specific type of compost- vermicompost. 

Lunar regolith contains toxins that have to be removed. The fungi absorb those toxins and keeps them away from the plants.

The plants also build a tolerance to the lunar environment.

These tests weren’t without issues though.

The plants took longer to grow than their Earth versions. They were more stressed too.

So we’re not ready for lunar hummus yet. But these are promising first steps. 

Constantly delivering food supplies from Earth isn’t feasible. Food sources on the moon would have immense implications for both colonies and voyages farther from our sun. 

And what a cool name for a study: From dust to seed: A lunar chickpea story

Sounds like a rags to riches biography.

Here’s a link if you want to check it out.

P.S. Here’s what’s been happening in the realm of food and space: