The Moon Society Forum

March 6, 2009
We incubated radish plants in a plant chamber under 24/7 lighting.

We wanted to see haw the radishes adapted to the poor soil conditions of Groveland iron mine tailings. We found that in pure mine tailing that the radishes would sprout but then die suddenly after two weeks. I theory was that the nutrition from the original seed was exhausted on the one hand and the iron tailngs were nutrient poor on the other, even if the temperature and water supply were adequate. Third the root systems did not develop in the mine tailing to the same extent that control plants did in regular potting soil. The root systems that developed in the ion tailings were 1/4 the size of those that developed in the potting soil and the young plants fell over from lack of root support.

We began to vary the composition between mine tailing and small pebble ranging from 90/10 tailings/pebbles to
80/ pebbles 10% tailings and 10% potting soil. On the 80/10/10 mixture seemed to survive after two weeks.

We then added another half cup of pyrogenic carbon material to the 80/10/10 formula and tried again. This time
we experienced much better development. the addition of the pyrogenic carbon seemed to really increase the vigor of the plant growth in what would still have to be described as sub-prime soils. The clay pots were place in a surrounding plastic bowl which was filled with water qnd which provided a continous water supply during the
trial. As of March 14 we have not looked at the root systems to determine the extent of the root systems.
There plants have out performed a control group that was in only potting soil.


We will repeat this experiment comparing the plant growth of radishes in JSC#1, with Groveland mine tailings,
with 10% potting soil component and also a 10% pyrogenic carbon mixture along with continous bottom water supply. Our interest is to see how effectively these plants can grow in a very rocky 70% pebble substrate with
10% fine rock particles, !0% potting soils, and 10% pyrogenic carbon. This is to test how if initially successful
plants might continue to grow and provided successive generations and improved the soils if these plants are
"tilled under" to increase the organic content of the pot over a period of 10 generations.

Dave Dunlop


We were curious to see