Getting a start on my out-of-this-world garden

Regular visitors to this column learned long ago that the landscape on Planet Kerth is a bit—well, “bizarre” is too judgmental.

Quirky? Twisted? Wonky?

Nope. Let’s go with askew. I can live with askew.

So you probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that I’m planting my Planet Kerth garden now, and this year I’ve decided not to do it the way most people on Planet Earth do it, but the way they do it on Planet Mars.

Well, they don’t do it that way on Mars yet, because right now Mars is pretty much totally uninhabited and un-gardened. But plans are being developed for how gardens on Mars will be grown when we get there.

If you saw the film “The Martian” starring Matt Damon, you know that gardening on Mars can be a bit more challenging than it is here in Huntley. But that was just a fictional film, so you have to take all his Hollywood woes with a grain of salt.

But I’m talking about gardening the real Mars way—the way gardeners will plant crops when they swap their Earth zip codes for Martian ones.

Oh, my backyard garden still has to use Earth soil, because Platt Hill Nursery doesn’t yet carry bags of Miracle Martian Gro. But my technique will be all Martian.

I learned that Martian technique from an article I read that explained that scientists are already trying to solve the problems we will face when we establish a colony on Mars sometime around 25 years from now. “A reliable source of home-grown food is a must,” the article says. “It simply would be too costly and risky to rely upon rocket deliveries to meet the food needs of colonists.”

And the most promising tests so far hint that the best way to garden on Mars will be to do “intercropping,” or planting several different vegetables together, rather than to devote separate plots to one crop alone, or “monocropping.”

It’s not a new idea. Thousands of years ago, ancient Mayans farmed that way. So did Native Americans here, who planted corn, beans, and squash together in a crop they called “three sisters.”

And now researchers Wieger Warnelink and Rebeca Goncalves in the Netherlands are experimenting with different plants to intercrop in Martian soil that they have recreated here on Earth, and some of their findings bode well for farming on Mars.

They started intercropping with cherry tomatoes, peas, and carrots together in the same plot, then they compared results to plots cultivated with each species planted alone.

And what were the results?

Well, the intercropped carrots didn’t do too well, probably because they were shaded by the taller plants.

The peas did equally well in either plot.

But the intercropped tomatoes?

According to the intercropping study: “Tomatoes grown in this manner produced about double the yield of tomatoes grown alone — or ‘monocropped’ — with more and bigger fruit. The tomatoes also flowered and matured earlier, gave more fruit per plant and had thicker stems.”

And the reason, according to the scientists, is that pea plants have the unique ability to capture nitrogen from the atmosphere. With the help of bacteria, that nitrogen is converted into a key nutrient in the soil.

Although their research is still in its infant stage, and they will have a quarter century or so to work out the bugs before they get to try it on Mars, I thought the method sounded just askew enough to try it on Planet Kerth first.

So I put aside the newspaper and rushed outside where I had planted a tomato plant into a container just the day before, and I pressed a dozen or so sugar snap peas into the soil around it. And then a few carrot seeds, just in case they’re important in some yet-to-be-discovered way. Cheerleaders, maybe?

And so, my dear Netherlander Martian researchers, if you keep reading my humble column in the future, I’ll keep you posted about my garden results here on Planet Kerth. It’s the least I can do to help our first pioneer farmers blasting off for Planet Mars sometime around 2050.

You’re welcome.

Of course, you’ll have to wait a couple months before I can tell you how my askew Planet Kerth tomatoes taste.

But I’m sure they’ll be out of this world.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

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