A Garden for Astronauts

When Kiri’s teacher announced a science competition called “Ideas for Space”, Kiri knew exactly what she wanted to build. Astronauts live for months on a space station, eating food from packets. Kiri thought they must miss fresh, crunchy vegetables. She decided to design a tiny garden that could grow lettuce in space.

She started with a clear plastic box, a strip of small lights and a few lettuce seeds. On Earth, that would be easy. But in space there is almost no gravity, the force that pulls things down. Kiri read that water does not pour in space. Instead, it floats around in wobbly bubbles that could get into the station’s machines. How could her plants drink?

For days Kiri sketched ideas in her notebook. Some were too heavy. Some were too messy. Then, one evening, she watched her little brother dip the corner of a towel into his bath. Slowly, the water crept up the towel all by itself. Kiri jumped up so fast that she knocked over her chair. “That’s it!” she shouted.

She built a prototype, a first test model, using strips of felt. One end of each strip sat in a sealed water pouch, and the other end touched the soil. The felt pulled the water up to the roots, gently and slowly, without a single drop escaping.

On competition day, Kiri’s lettuce had four small green leaves. She did not win first prize; a boy who designed a moon buggy did. But one of the judges, a real engineer, asked if she could take photographs of Kiri’s felt strips. “This is clever, simple thinking,” the engineer said. “That is exactly what we need up there.”

On the bus home, Kiri was already drawing her next design: a garden for tomatoes.