Building Ecosystems



A friend asked me to point her to some resources on building an enclosed ecosystem for her apartment. She wanted something like a terrarium, with plants. So, today in this blog post I lead with the activity and we can move on to more next.

Have you filled a jar with living plants and watched them grow?

It can be as simple or as fancy as you want.

NASA has this great guide on making your own mini-garden that is designed for children!

I love this video by a florist that shows how to set one up with similar materials. Their system is a cloche, and it looks fancy. 

Jars with Life
I showed our 10 year old the video linked above, and she skimmed through the guide from NASA, too. Then we all found glass jars and plastic containers around our home. We found our gardening caddy, too. We brought them together outside to the table, where I had rocks and pebbles waiting for us.  

Our 10 year old led the lesson for her 8 and 4 year old sisters, and I helped out. They all put some pebbles in their containers. 
Then we walked around our backyard to where we have a little wet spot on the side of the house. It happens to be where our air conditioner drainpipe drips. That's where we have a lot of moss growing on the dirt.

Our 4 year old immediately scooped up some moss with her shovel. No instruction needed, she just knew what to do! Here is what the moss looks like on her pink shovel.
we placed moss on top of the rocks in our containers. Here is a photo.
Next we added a plant or two. Two children chose spider plants Chlorophytum comosum to add to their containers. At first, our 4 year old put hers in upside down and started closing the lid! Everyone had a good laugh - including her. We stopped her and explained her roots and leaves to her, then gave more specific instructions. We asked her to make a little hole with her finger to drop the plant's roots into. With a little extra instruction - and humor - she got her plant into place happily. 
Here is a photo of our 10 year old's jar before she closed the lid.

Our 8 year old decided she wanted to use her jar to grow new roots on a large branch that she cut off from a hibiscus plant that she likes. She will have to leave her jar open. Here's a shot.
We will come back in a few days to report back on how things grow!
6 days later: Everything is still alive!!

Rocks
Oh, you may have noticed they only used our little pebbles in their little gardens. What did they do with our bigger rocks? Something they can do at home but shouldn't do on a trail: stacking! 
Stacks of rocks are called cairns. Rock Cairns are used as trail markers in some parks. Don't make your own because that can confuse hikers. It can also disturb the tiny world of creatures that live under the rocks!

Learn more about Cairns from the National Park Service here:

Temperature Control in Earth
When people live in extreme environments on Earth, they need to conserve and recycle their resources as much as possible.
Cultures throughout time have been working very hard at making extreme environments work for them. That includes adjusting the temperature in indoor spaces through architectural design. 

Cooling:
I enjoyed this piece from Arch Daily which explains some traditional methods of passive cooling that have been applied to modern architecture.

Retaining Heat:
Up North in the frigid Arctic, the Inuit people of Alaska build igloos with packed snow. I enjoyed reading this piece about how they are constructed and how they work, from the Canadian Encyclopedia.

Growing Food:
Growing plants food in temperature extremes is challenging. The range of acceptable temperatures for crop plants can be tricky to synch with the seasons. One way to extend (that's a fancy word for making something longer) a growing season in a cold climate is to start seeds indoors during the winter and transplant them to the field once there is no danger of frost.
But how do people grow food in environments that are so harsh that they have virtually no growing season?
Let's travel to the other side of the globe and look at Antarctica.

Did you know that people have been growing plants in Antarctica for over 100 years? Here is a fun piece by Emma the Space Gardener of The Unconventional Gardener about it: https://theunconventionalgardener.com/blog/over-100-years-of-antarctic-agriculture-is-helping-scientists-grow-food-in-space/

Space Research
Did you know that NASA has an interest in enclosed ecosystems? Let's talk about Bioregenerative life support systems!
Lunar and Martian Greenhouses!

The MELiSSA project is run by the European Space Agency. It stands for: Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative. Read more about the program here:

Did you hear about the 🍤🦐 SCAMPI experiment?
It's an enclosed ecosystem that students are getting ready to launch into space in late 2024!

Learn more about this entirely aquatic ecosystem - that includes shrimp - on their website here:

Here's a sneak peak picture of the hardware.
Future of Space Ecosystems
With the release of the Decadal Survey for the Biological and Physical Sciences earlier this year, we saw a renewed interest in Bioregenerative Life Support Systems.
Read more here:
That Decadal isn't written for children. But it has some inspiring images. Flip through the online version and see how you relate.

I will come back to this blog entry to add more, but for now, this is a fun start.

Thanks for reading. If you like this content, please share it with your friends.

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