this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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Mixing vermicompost into the regolith seems a bit like cheating.
Vermicompost is something you can readily make on the moon, meaning with this it proves you can take a resource available on the moon and grow in it.
Big deal IMO.
Well. “Proves” since it’s simulated regolith, not real regolith, and it was done on earth.
I started out wondering if this simulation would work again in lunar gravity, and now we also need vermiculture to work in lunar gravity.
We’re already working on worms in space!
https://www.esa.int/kids/en/news/Worms_in_space
Granted these aren’t the works we’d make vermicompost from … but still steps in that direction
Cool. Sadly it doesn’t seem like it was even a goal for those worms to survive.
Yeah, we NEED to find a way to cheat, cheating is what will let us actually do any of this.
You need far less composting agents this way, you can add a little to a lot of moon soil to make it fertile enough for growth, and then once plants get started it will work towards making even more compost/soil.
Compost is biomaterial so it manly consists of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. The only part of that you can find on the moon is oxygen, so you can't expand beyond the amount of air and biomass (manly food) you ship from earth.
You can also find hydrogen in the water at the poles. Nitrogen, yep, that's a big one.
Yes, but this means you don't have to take dirt with you as well. Dirt is heavy.
The article seems to imply the compost was added to both the plants with/without the fungi?
Definitely cheating in the "can we grow plants?" department, but still useful information.
What would you propose, then?
We use organic amendments all the time when reclaiming historically mined lands that did not salvage soils.
Soils take millennia to form, and you're not going to get fertile soils without either kickstarting the process or waiting.
Another commentator points out that using arbuscular mychorrizhal fungi is also cheating. Again, how?
To have a functional soil and not regolith you need the following:
Organic matter is your pool of nutrients and microbes and fungi are what mineralize this pool into plant available forms, so saying they are cheating doesnt hold water (like a shitty regolith).
But I can grow plants in glass beads! Sure you can, but you're supplying chemical fertilizer to do it and constantly replacing that - so in this case you're the organic matter pool and the transformation vector.
@melfie@lemy.lol @cadekat@pawb.social
That’s nothing, I can grown plants in almost pure silica (i.e. a glass plant pot full of soil).