Farming on the Moon: Will plants grow?

Jon Kelvey, The Independent, 5/19/22; Pat Macpherson, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Scientists grow plants in lunar soil, bad news

Very realistic moon dust brightly reflecting sun

[Is our moon solid? Is it artificial, hollow, and full of water? Is it very near? Did we see actual footage of a landing or poorly done studio footage? Do we have actual soil from the surface? Or is this all a distraction?]

The good news for proponents of space colonization is that scientists have shown plants can be grown in moon dirt.

But the bad news for anyone envisioning a lushly verdant lunar astronaut salad bar is that plants grown in lunar regolith don’t grow very well and are generally stressed out by the experience.

In a new study published Thursday in the journal Communications Biology, researchers at the University of Florida grew plants in lunar regolith from NASA’s Apollo missions for the first time, comparing their growth to that of plants seeded in terrestrial volcanic ash.

Thale cress (Wiki)

The lackluster performance of the plants grown in the Apollo samples presents a challenge for proponents of in “situ resources utilization,” the term for astronauts creating their water, oxygen, fuel, or in this case, food, from resources found on an extraplanetary body rather than pack them from earth. 

The researchers seeded Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant more commonly known as thale cress, either in samples of lunar regolith brought back to Earth by the Apollo 11, 12, and 17 missions, or in a volcanic ash-based control soil designed to mimic lunar regolith. The plants seeded into the Moon samples grew slower, smaller, and showed more signs of stress such as pigmentation and the expression of stress-related genes, than those grown in the volcanic ash. More

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