Gardening in Antarctica

Yes believe it or not, we have a little garden at Davis Station!!

 

Not exactly your standard garden, but inside the white building Davis Station has a pretty good hydraponics setup and grows produce all year round.  Mainly established for the Wintering crew, this will supply them fresh produce such as lettuce, bok choy, tomotoes, cucumbers and herbs.

This month has been warm enough to leave the door ajar 24 hours a day to regulate the temperature back down to about 25.  It has been as high as 32!

 

One of the warmest building at Davis Station and definitely the one with the highest humidity level. 

Walking into the building the first thing that you notice is the overwhelming earthy smell, particularly the tomato plants.  Aside from Hydraponics setups, there is no plant life to be found on Antarctica. Apart from the beach smells, the Elephant seals, Adelie colonies etc. the place is virtually void of any normal smells found in Australia.

We have two rooms, with 5 different systems.  Each system has its own water tank and a pump which pumps water and nutrients to the plants.  These are our herbs.

 

This is my gardening buddy, Melanie Ho filling one of the tanks for the cucumbers.  Mel and I are one of 3 teams that cycle weekly and help look after the hydraponics setup.  Mel is a Marine Biologist and down here researching for her PHD.  Mel helps run the Aquarium, where all the marine specimens are kept, that the divers collect......more on this next time!!!

 

Each morning we fill most of the tanks.  The tomato tank uses by far the most water.  We put about 10 litres of water every morning into the tomato tank.  Other duties include checking for blockages or leaks through the system, sweeping the floor (dropped perculite and leaves etc.), recording ambient and tank water temperatures and whether we filled the tanks with water or not.  The lights we use are a high pressure sodium light.  These last about a year before being replaced.

 

We also monitor pH and EC levels.  These are the levels for our lettuce seedlings.

pH is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of soil or a solution. A basic, neutral solution is numerically equal to 7. The solution gets more acidic as the numbers decrease and more alkaline as the numbers increase. The ph scale ranges from 0 pH (very acidic) to 14 pH (highly alkaline). Pure water has a pH of 7, indicating that it is neither alkaline nor acidic, but neutral. Different nutrients may be absorbed at different pH levels. 

EC stands for Electrical Conductivity.  Low conductivitiy means low nutrient concentration, often resulting in nutritional deficiencies and slow plant growth. High conductivity means more food for your plants, but can also burn or kill them.  Depending on the plant or if the plant is bearing fruit or in flower, these levels can vary.

These are our Bok Choy seedlings. 
 
We treat the hydraponics setup as a quarantine area.  All Hydraponics waste is burnt in our Warren, which is a high temperature incinerator.  We also have to wash our hands everytime we enter the containers and before we touch the plants so there is no chance of introducing any diseases to the plants.

Our capsicum plants.

All of our produce is welcomed by the kitchen and does not last long with 80 or so expeditioners.  As most of our food stored frozen or canned, it is nice to have fresh produce.  During the winter, it goes a little further with only 20 or so mouths to feed.