Tomatosphere!

TOMATOSPHERE!
Does that sound a bit likeOuter Space’? …Well, it is!

For nine years now, the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Guelph, Agriculture Canada, Heinz Foods, and Stokes Seeds have participated with over 12,000 schools in Canada and the USA to grow tomato seeds as part of a “Mission to Mars” study.

 Astronauts in space for a long time will need nutritious and tasty food, but they have limited room! Tomatoes can be transported as seeds and when grown, provide good nutrition, remove carbon dioxide exhaled by humans, return oxygen to the air, and even provide purified water through transpiration from the leaves! Wow!  …but the question is… will tomato seeds be able to germinate (grow from a seed) and grow healthy plants with lots of fruit?

 We did a “blind study” in our class (no, we didn’t have to wear blindfolds!) for this SCIENCE EXPERIMENT.  We were given two packages of seeds but weren’t told which were the “control group” (normal) and with were the “treatment group” (put in a simulated space environment for 3 months).   We grew our seeds in peat pellets (they look like mini hockey pucks that POP UP into little plant pots!) under our special “grow light” in the classroom. We counted how many germinated and we did some measuring to see which plants grew the best.  We learned how the first seed leaves are very simple so that they can grow fast and we saw how the true leaves were a lot fancier! 

We also tried germinating the seeds in little gel balls.  That didn’t work as well as just planting them in soil.

When the roots started to grow through the pellets, we could transplant them into bigger pots.  They made great Father’s Day presents too!

 

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