Giving New Meaning to “Lunar Gardening”
The Moon has many implications for our earthly gardening endeavors. Gardening by the phases of the Moon can speed the rate of seed germination, and by gardening during specific signs of the zodiac (which correspond to the elements; each plant has a particular preference for which elemental sign it is planted in) you can effectively create a happily blooming garden.
Paragon Space Development Corporation has recently teamed up with Odyssey Moon to develop a pressurized mini-greenhouse that will be deployed on the surface of the moon; the hope is to have the first plants growing “on” the Moon by 2012.
The goal is to plant a seed within the pressurized greenhouse, watch it grow into a plant, and the hope is that it will then flower and seed itself. While the greenhouse has been equipped with all of the things the plant will need to thrive (such as ways to protect it from the Sun’s glaring radiation, enough soil and carbon dioxide, and oxygen removal), this truly marks one of the first steps to gardening outside the confines of our earthly atmosphere and certainly gives new meaning to the term “lunar gardening.”
Because even getting such a device to the Moon will take careful planning on the part of aerospace engineers, the likelihood of these engineers including a plan for the greenhouse to make it to the Moon during a specific lunar phase is small. But still, I have to wonder: We know how the Moon affects our earthly gardens; what would be the implications of such lunar energy on a plant grown on (though not actually touching the surface of) the Moon?
