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To simulate a gardening experience on the Red Planet, researchers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and the Florida Tech Buzz Aldrin Space Institute have begun to experiment with "Martian gardens," using soil from Hawaii similar to the type of soil found on Mars. Martian soil is made up of crushed volcanic rock and contains no organic material, making plant survival significantly more difficult.
To gauge how much soil should be used and which nutrients should be added, researchers grew lettuce in three different types of soil: virtual Martian soil with no nutrients added, virtual Martian soil with nutrients added, and regular potting soil. They reported that the lettuce grown in the Mars-like soil with no nutrients added tasted the same, but had weaker roots and took longer to grow.
Next, they plan to conduct similar experiments with radishes, Swiss chard, kale, Chinese cabbage, snow peas, dwarf peppers and tomatoes.
Potatoes, guys, potatoes.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Sunday October 09 2016, @07:21AM
You might need to add a shitload of organic materials, but onfe you get people there that should be possible
(No, I'm not serious and I do not beleive everything Hollywood tells me)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @09:51AM
No it really is that simple. Nutrients and organic materials are all it takes, oh and a couple billion years.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 09 2016, @10:26AM
Take some flies, some earthworms, all the stuff that we have here on earth. It may take a few years, maybe a hundred even, but with a kickstart from earth, it won't take a couple billion years. It may seem wastefully expensive, but trucking a load of topsoil from earth to Mars would get things going nicely. Find some nice, lush gardening soil full of life, scrape off the top three feet of soil, and take it all, grubs and all. Rotting leave, wildflower seeds, whatever happens to be there, just take it.
On arrival on Mars, make some garden beds, and mix the earth soil with the martian soil about one part in ten. The living stuff already in the earth soil will get to work on the Martian soil.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday October 09 2016, @11:00AM
Quite likely, just shipping anything will result in an imbalance. For instance, a fungus of bacteria that doesn't have it's natural predator (even if that's another fungus or bacteria).
It'll love and it spread like wildfire and you're going to end chasing your own tails trying to kill it off without killing off your plants.
There have been very few experiments growing food in such sterile atmospheres, and almost all of them are very careful about WHAT they take in for that reason.
Additionally, you're still looking at a loss of nutrients. To get a cyclic, ever-renewing system is hard work and requires an awfully large base of animals, bacteria, etc. Especially when you have humans in there taking it away to feed themselves. Even if you recycle their waste, you've still burnt off an enormous amount of nutrients and energy which needs replenishing. Mars isn't going to be the place you want to ship a few ton of soil every few years.
The reason Mars is pretty lifeless is that it's hostile to such a scenario, as far as we know. It doesn't provide the same amount that it would take life to survive there. Otherwise we wouldn't need to do anything.
You really need to get to the point of self-sustaining cycles to enjoy any kind of notable success. Anything else is literally just supplying them from Earth (which generates enough, plus a surplus for us to do such a thng!) like any other space mission.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Sunday October 09 2016, @05:03PM
With enough humans and animals, and extra food shipped in, soil wouldn't need to be sent. Especially if the spaceship saves all the shit instead of sending it out into space, because that shit will be valuable on Mars. Compost it by itself, or feed it to manure worms, and you will have good high quality soil preloaded with microscopic life. It will be worthwhile to send at least some soil from earth, from multiple areas and with a multitude of soil fungi and bacteria, but there's no way to send all the soil needed without impoverishing earth so building soil on mars will need to be the focus (how many tons of soil can one ship haul? probably not enough for more than an acre or two, and those would be the most expensive acres outside NYC). On top of all this we can ship in nutrients or maybe make them on site (not sure what sources of NPK + trace minerals are on mars or nearby) and grow hydroponically. I can't imagine that they would send any bees along, let alone the huge diversity of bugs needed for pollinating different crops, so anything not wind-pollinated will be extremely labor intensive.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 09 2016, @06:33PM
"probably not enough for more than an acre or two"
Not sure if you visualize open spaces or not, but I'll spell it out anyway. Growing food on Mars is going to look like hydroponics and raised beds. Initially, all the spaces with atmosphere are going to be crowded with humans. With each new ship's arrival, those spaces will cyclically grow crowded, then less crowded, then crowded again. And, the plants are going to have to live in the same spaces that the humans do.
I don't imagine that the immigrants to Mars will be making anything so extravagant as a green house, for a long time to come.
Oh yeah - grow lights. There will be grow lights everywhere, because Mars doesn't get as much light as Earth. The difference may not mean much to you or to me, but chlorophyl isn't like us.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Sunday October 09 2016, @10:37PM
Yeah obviously everything would be enclosed and hydroponics would be the majority for a long time, but I meant acres in total area not contiguous. Even the soil-based stuff would rely on hydroponic technology because there isn't much/any soil moisture on Mars and water will be rationed so conventional methods will be too wasteful, and like you said lighting will be an issue for a lot of things (lichens and fungi might be ok without them). Plants in each area will probably be a necessity simply for air recycling, we can do it mechanically but plants are much more efficient.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday October 09 2016, @06:36PM
Space shuttle payload: 22.7 tonne.
Topsoil: 1.3 tonnes to the cubic metre
Each shuttle could only lift off 18 cubic metres, by weight.
That's enough to put a 5 cm thick layer of soil over a 20m square. A small garden at best, of very thin soil.
Good luck! You've be looking at dozens, if not hundreds, of space shuttles full of nothing but soil.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Sunday October 09 2016, @11:12AM
You might need to add a shitload of organic materials
...but it has to be Matt Damon's shit, because that's special. My copy of the Blu Ray actually had an ad for a Well Known Brand of potato in the box (but, happily, no foil sachet of Matt's finest output).
BTW: In the book, Watney was supposed to be experimenting with growing plants in Martian gravity, so he already had a quantity of fertile soil to add to his mars dust & man dung mix.