Plant Life Support ™ is the ideal gift for a gardener that can’t trust their friends to keep their plant family alive when they’re away. It’s a great talking point too. Imagine if you had a friend over and they saw your Plant Life Support IV bag hanging there by your Boston fern in the corner (or whatever plant you have). They’re obviously going to laugh and ask what’s going on with it. It’s not something you see every day but it’s definitely hilarious. Plant health is just about the most important thing a budding gardener can learn. After years in the garden nurturing and learning from our successes and our failures, gardeners become kind of ‘plant doctors’! NASA has sponsored extensive research on growing various species of leafy vegetables and small fruits in controlled environment chambers. This research revealed the importance of managing water and nutrient supplies to the plants, the effects of elevated and super-elevated CO 2 on plants, and the profound influence of light on crop growth and development. This in turn has driven the development and testing of LED lighting and other new technologies for space crop production. Other key gaps exist in our knowledge base, such as the effects of reduced gravity on the plants and their support systems, such as water delivery, and the effects of space radiation. Most of this testing occurred in “ground” settings, but small plant chambers have been built and tested in space. These chambers have become successively larger with better environmental control, but none have been used with the sole intent for providing fresh food for the astronauts. Exploratory tests with the Veggie plant chamber are beginning to do this, but a dedicated “vegetable production unit” with better environmental control is still needed. Concluding Remarks All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication. Funding

It’s great for when you’re away. Maybe you’re not necessarily forgetful when it comes to watering your plants but you are going away for a few days and don’t have anyone who can come in and keep them hydrated. Plant Life Support will work for that too and ensure they stay nice and lively while you’re not there. It’s useful to ask: have I over watered or under watered the plant? Is it in too much sunlight or not enough? And is the soil healthy? These three areas are absolutely key to plant health. This is no bird-of-paradise-flower-situation, these spicy red numbers are unmistakably penile from head to shaft. Except for the little green bit on the stem, obvs. If you actually have one of those on your knob, please see a doctor, you may be at risk of being diagnosed as a plant.Children then fill in the missing words from sentences explaining each part of the process. After, they are challenged to explain the life cycle of a sunflower. Children should grow more confident as they complete each task, supporting their independent learning. No longer do you have to "leaf" your plants in the murderous hands of a friend or relative whilst you’re away on that dream trip. You can allow Plant Life Support ™ to drip-feed everything your plant needs for the duration of your vacation. Peace of mind: it’s the "root" of all happiness. Funding for this review manuscript provided through NASA Biological and Physical Sciences Program, and NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems Program. Conflict of Interest Plant life cycles vary according to the type of plant. For a bean plant, there are the following stages of growth from the seed to the mature plant:

Postdoctoral Program, Universities Space Research Association, Kennedy Space Center, FL, United States This Interactive PDF activity is a fantastic way to support your child's remote learning about plants. Covering content on plant life cycles, this activity can be completed on screen with no need to print anything out. We all know the feeling: you come home to find your parlour palm lifeless and limp, soil as dry as the Gobi Desert - it’s devastating. But it doesn’t have to be that way... Plant Life Support ™ is a self-watering system that will sustain your indoor plants when you’re not around.Space brings with it unique environmental constraints for crops. This inspired the concept of a Crop Readiness Level or CRL ( Wheeler and Strayer, 1997), which is a maturation scale analogous to technology readiness levels (TRL) but for crops and BLSS. For example, short or dwarf growth, high harvest index, high yields, organoleptic acceptance, good nutrient content, and ability to control microbial contaminants are all desirable traits for the selection and maturation of CRL for space ( Romeyn et al., 2019; Spencer et al., 2021). The current scale is focused on ISS and Mars transit needs, but surface settings with larger BLSS crop systems might consider different criteria or factors appropriate for those settings, such as higher macronutrient content, ability to grow in multispecies plantings, or radiation tolerance. Like applying TRL for aerospace hardware, a CRL approach provides a logical progression of testing for future space crops. Historical Context of Preparing Crops for Spaceflight: Ground-Based Research Using light emitting diodes (LEDs) to grow plants was proposed and patented through a NASA Commercialization Center at the University of Wisconsin ( Barta et al., 1992). LEDs were first used in the Astroculture (ASC) plant chamber aboard the Space Shuttle ( Morrow et al., 1995) then the Advanced Astroculture Chamber (ADVASC) ( Link et al., 2003), and later the Veggie and Advanced Plant Habitat for the ISS, both of which are currently flying aboard the ISS ( Massa et al., 2016; Morrow et al., 2016). To support the development of LED lighting for space, NASA sponsored ground testing from the early 1990’s through the mid 2000’s with leafy greens and other crops ( Goins et al., 1997; Kim et al., 2004; Massa et al., 2008). These studies showed that both red and blue light improved plant photosynthesis and growth ( Bula et al., 1991; Dougher and Bugbee, 2001; Yorio et al., 2001; Douglas et al., 2016). Subsequent LED studies revealed important roles for green and far-red light as well ( Spencer et al., 2020). Recent NASA research showed that supplementing with far-red LEDs can act like adding more photosynthetically active radiation--PAR (400–700nm) ( Zhen and Bugbee, 2020), and that LEDs can achieve remarkable efficiencies (>3µmol/J), which could greatly reduce electrical power needs for BLSS ( Kusuma et al., 2020). This has far-reaching implications for future missions. In addition to electric lighting systems, solar lighting techniques that use concentrators and fiber optics were also explored for growing crops ( Cuello et al., 2000; Nakamura et al., 2009). Trying to balance your professional and plant parent lifestyles but don’t know how to? Watering indoor plants couldn’t be easier with the Mini Plant Life Support plant self-watering system. If your roots are slimy and smelly then you’ve got a problem. It’s important to look at whether or not the roots of a plant have been immersed too long in water – causing root rot. If you have got a case of this then, remove the plant if you can, then allow the substrate to dry out completely before deciding whether to return the plant to this space or to find a better suited environment for it. Plant Life Support is probably exactly what you’d imagine. It’s a mini IV-drip filled with water that gradually ensures your plants get the H2O they need even if you forget for days on end. “Introducing Plant Life Support, the miniature lifelike IV drip for your houseplants! Pop it into a pot with the included stand, fill it up with water and it’ll take care of the rest – slowly feeding your plant with just the right amount of water as and when it needs it,” the item description reads.

Use this resource so children can recap all the key words associated with the life cycle of a plant, including germination and seed dispersal. This resource comes with fantastic illustrations to engage children and help them understand the steps in the life cycle. When you’re ready to repot your plants into something more fitting (coming soon: the Firebox terracotta vagina), the magical eco-friendly cube will slowly decompose and turn into valuable coconut fibre fertiliser for the plant, enriched with all sorts of stuff that makes chillies fully erect big and handsome.

Funding

Christina M. Johnson 1 Haley O. Boles 2 LaShelle E. Spencer 3 Lucie Poulet 1 Matthew Romeyn 4 Jess M. Bunchek 5 Ralph Fritsche 4 Gioia D. Massa 4 Aubrie O’Rourke 4 Raymond M. Wheeler 4* The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Publisher’s Note This year in National Plant Health Week (from the 9th May) we are working with the RHS to encourage younger garden visitors to learn why plants are so important to our survival and what we can do in our own gardens at home to contribute to this important work nationally.