Scientists Have Just Successfully Grown Chickpeas In Simulated Moon Dirt For The First Time Using Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi To Absorb Nutrients And Water.

You need humus to grow hummus ;)

I heard it's out of this world!

imagine it was way better then earth chickpeas
and it made the hummus better

Vermicompost is something you can readily make on the moon, meaning with this it proves you can take a resource available on the moon and grow in it.

Big deal IMO.

Well. “Proves” since it’s simulated regolith, not real regolith, and it was done on earth.

The article seems to imply the compost was added to both the plants with/without the fungi?

Definitely cheating in the "can we grow plants?" department, but still useful information.

What would you propose, then?

We use organic amendments all the time when reclaiming historically mined lands that did not salvage soils.

Soils take millennia to form, and you're not going to get fertile soils without either kickstarting the process or waiting.

Another commentator points out that using arbuscular mychorrizhal fungi is also cheating. Again, how?

To have a functional soil and not regolith you need the following:

• An organic matter source - regolith lacks this
• A moisture retaining media - regolith usually has this but its ability varies widely
• Enough rooting depth for your desired plants
• A method to transform organic matter to nutrients - regolith generally lacks this

Organic matter is your pool of nutrients and microbes and fungi are what mineralize this pool into plant available forms, so saying they are cheating doesnt hold water (like a shitty regolith).

But I can grow plants in glass beads! Sure you can, but you're supplying chemical fertilizer to do it and constantly replacing that - so in this case you're the organic matter pool and the transformation vector.

@melfie@lemy.lol @cadekat@pawb.social

Sure, but the alternative is to stop destroying our own soils and respect our ecosystem, and humanity has proven it will take on any challenge except cleaning up after ourselves

It's coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere.

I’ve also learned about it being sharp. What I haven’t heard answered is this. It’s sharp because there’s no weather to wear it down. If there were, how easily would it wear down? Does it crumble the second anything touches it? Being sharp and staying sharp are two different things. How much of a threat is this stuff, actually?

Low and zero gravity can affect how roots spread/dig and later can cause issues with how water and nutrients circulate through the stalk since they evolved to circulate with Earth level gravity. Space station experiments have proven it’s not impossible, the plants can adapt, they’re just a bit different. Trees would probably struggle, most crops would be fine. What’s really difficult is pollination. You’d probably have to hand pollinate, set up a wind system in your greenhouse, or get self-pollinaters. Bees would struggle to adapt because low gravity would mess with their flight, their dance communication, and probably their honeycomb structure and larval development.

I imagine they would grow taller, possibly faster

That’s what you don’t get from this simulation.

My uneducated guess is that 1/6th gravity would still be a great deal more like earth than 0 gravity.

Holy fuck you stacked the diss

No but it does mean we don't need to ship up potting soil if a base were to be established.

No idea what you're on about, chickpeas are GOAT. Tasty, full of good stuff for you, brings lots of vegetal protein, and, like, hummus??

I bet this will be the cheapest protein available in space in the future.