The Greenhouse

“It’s very bad soil you know,” his mother had said.

It wasn’t that his mother wasn’t right; in fact he was reminded of her words every day when he tramped out of the door of his home and across his bare plot towards the greenhouse - the only green to be seen for miles around.

First he checked a complicated and ramshackle looking machine that was whirring (and occasionally spluttering) by the greenhouse door. He tutted to himself as he brushed a fine layer of dust off the solar panel he had propped up on the south-facing side of the device.

That stuff just gets everywhere no matter how much you try, he thought.

The machinery seemed happy enough for the moment, although it wasn’t vital to the greenhouse. He had once been told that having a higher carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere was helpful to growing, so he’d begged and borrowed the parts to put together a simple pump to add CO2 to the greenhouse atmosphere. Not much, but enough to make a difference he hoped. It also gave him a headache if he worked inside too long.

He opened and closed the greenhouse’s outer door, entering what he called ‘the airlock’, and picked up his tools - just some rubber gloves and some secateurs for today. He opened and passed through the greenhouse’s inner door, closing it behind him. Outside the CO2 pumped strained at the momentary change in air pressure.

The greenhouse was, by his reckoning (not that he’d ever measured), about 8 metres long and 6 metres wide, taking up most of his plot of land but giving him a much needed warm growing space. He paused inside the door, looking up and down the 4 wide rows of plants for anything obviously out of place.

On the right, the northern side of the greenhouse, was what he hoped would become his tallest crop, the tomatoes. These had started off well as seedlings, but the shock of entering the soil (despite the 2 years he had spent trying every preparatory method he could find) had left them looking pale and stunted.

To the left of them he had a long low miniature greenhouse which ran the full length of the row, under which he had planted a variety of salad leaves. These were doing better than the tomatoes, mostly he suspected due to the extra heat, although he did worry about how much light they were getting. The sun here was always darker than he’d remembered as a child.

The final two rows were a mixture of potatoes, onions, garlic, courgettes and parsnips. How these were developing was difficult to tell and it would be several months until he could harvest his crop and finally see how they’d grown. The topside parts of the plants (like the tomatoes) looked quite unhealthy. Although rather than dying off they still seemed to be growing, if very slowly. He took that as a good sign.

But it was very bad soil. Bone dry, high in peroxides, low in nitrogen and phosphorous. And very, very rocky. It had taken him two months just to pick the rocks, stones and gravel out of the soil.

He went to work, starting with the tomatoes, which needed checking for parasites and then had to be pruned to encourage them to fruit. Parasites were a concern. Much like the dust which seemed to get everywhere, fruit flies and aphids could turn up in the most unlikely of places despite the hostile environment outside and his best efforts to keep them out.

While he checked the plants over he mumbled to himself quietly, feeling contented even as he had to pick off the small bugs which he found under the occasional leaf. What his mother didn’t understand was that this kind of thing could be so satisfying.

He moved onto the salads under the miniature greenhouse. These needed thinning out. He’d overdone the seeds a little. Opening the roof of each section of the miniature greenhouse he moved gradually down the row, gently tugging out the unhealthier looking plants and being careful to shake off as much of the valuable soil as he could.

Two rows down. His back was already sore after several hours of crouching next to the tomatoes and then leaning over the salads. Why did he never remember to start with the shorter plants? And why, he berated himself, did he always forget to bring out that cushion for him to kneel on?

He straightened up with a slow deliberate movement, his hands cradling and then pushing his lower back forwards to stretch it. The sun was beginning to get low, so he’d have to get a move on. He passed out of the greenhouse through the airlock, again making the CO2 pump whine in protest, and quickly stepped inside the house. He re-emerged a moment later carrying the handy square of foam he’d shaped as a cushion to kneel on when he gardened. It didn’t prevent his knees to clicking when he stood up, but it at least kept them clean and stopped the small stones left the soil sticking into them.

Walking back to the greenhouse a movement on his left caught his eye. He looked out towards the horizon. Beyond the crater walls and plastic dome of his home, probably 6-7 miles distant, a lone vehicle was passing over the rocky red soil, stirring up a cloud of dust behind it. Dust that he was sure would soon be inside his home or greenhouse and eventually his lungs…

He paused for a moment, looking out at the desolate landscape around him and still getting the feeling that it was all so alien even after the many years he had lived there. He trudged back into the greenhouse and, kneeling on his cushion, began tending to a patch of potatoes.

Even when he’d tried that one time to explain the sense of satisfaction he got from his work to his mother she just couldn’t get it. Why not tend a garden here on Earth? Things grow fine here! Or why not work in hydroponics if you want to feed people and play with plants? It’s nice and easy and safe! Why do it this way?

It wasn’t simply about the plants or the food or the gardening. It was about sustaining life in the 144 cubic metres of glass-enclosed space around him, inside the clear plastic dome that covered his crater-bordered plot of land, in one of the most inhospitable environments accessible by man. And it was about doing it with as little reliance on the hydroponic sciences as possible. It was about having a greenhouse on Red Mars.