Homesteading on the Moon with Kevin Espiritu

About This Episode

Could you grow your own food on the moon? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly sit down with Kevin Espiritu, the gardening YouTuber behind Epic Gardening, to dig into backyard farming, the future of sustainable food, and what it would actually take to feed yourself on Earth or anywhere else.

Kevin describes how he got into growing plants and how it doesn’t always require lots of land. Chuck admits to being an avid gardener secretly and fangirls over Kevin’s 30 fruit trees. How self-sufficient can you reasonably be on an urban lot? Do solar and rainwater collection save money?

We get into the science of how plants actually grow. What’s the difference between hydroponics and aeroponics? Why do hydroponic plants grow faster but taste flatter? Do plants use green light? We explore whether LEDs can really replace sunlight or if plants can tell the difference. We explore vertical farming, how plants evolved for specific light conditions, and why some plants like partial shade. Why does more of a good thing kill them?

Then we take it to space. Could we grow food hydroponically in lunar habitats? What about aquaponics with fish? Would space-grown plants even taste good? Kevin recounts the sobering reality of his 30-day experiment feeding himself entirely from his own land. We explore topics around farming practices like topsoil loss, the monoculture trap, travelling bees for almond orchards, and how industrial agriculture keeps solving problems by manually recreating what nature was already doing for free.

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