Hellooo Space Gardener!
If you like plants, space, and plants in space, then you're among friends.
Hello and welcome,
I’m Emma the Space Gardener, and it’s lovely to meet you. I’m the producer and host of the only podcast entirely devoted to gardening in space. It’s called Gardeners of the Galaxy, which is awesome, but it’s not like I’m the only person to have ever come up with that name! In the podcast episodes, I get to talk to some of the people sending their botany experiments into space, which is fabulous for me, because I am a nerd.
Isn’t gardening in space a bit of a niche topic, you ask? Well, it is, to be sure. But it’s a growing field (if you’ll pardon the pun!). With more and more people leaving the planet for longer and longer, we have to find new ways to feed them. And keep them sane. Plants can help with that.
I’m just a gardener* who finds the idea of plants in space fascinating, but there are scientists (and school kids, seriously) all over the world working on real experiments involving sending plants (and seeds, and algae, and fungi, oh my!) into space. What they’re learning can help us here on Earth as well, and we could really use the help!
I started this newsletter – the Mission Report – as a way to keep track of all the wonderful things that are happening in the (off) world of astrobotany. So if you sign up…
… then you’ll get a weekly email packed with links to things you might want to read, watch or listen to. Experiments that are running in space, launches that are about to happen, pictures of people doing things with seeds, that kind of thing. And then there’s also interesting stuff about space generally, or botany on Earth, because – as I mentioned – I’m a nerd. Want to get in touch? You can write to me at earth@spacebotany.uk
* actually, I’m a science writer with degrees in ethnobotany and astrophysics. I like to think of myself as the world’s first ethnoastrobotanist, but “gardener” is shorter.