Strawberries may be good outer space crop.

• Position: YOUR LIFE

Astronauts one day could tend their own crops on long space missions, and researchers from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., have found a healthy candidate to help satisfy their sweet tooth--a strawberry that requires little maintenance and energy.

Cary Mitchell, professor of horticulture, and Gioia Massa, a horticulture research scientist, tested several cultivars of strawberries and found one variety (Seascape) that seems to meet the requirements for becoming a space crop. 'What we're trying to do is grow our plants and minimize all of our inputs." Massa explains. 'We can grow these strawberries under shorter photoperiods than we thought and still get pretty much the same amount of yield."

Seascape strawberries are day-neutral, meaning they are not sensitive to the length of available daylight to flower. Seascape was tested with as much as 20 hours of daylight and as little as 10 hours. While there were fewer strawberries with less light, each berry was larger and the volume of the yields statistically was the same. "I was astounded that, even with a dayneutral cultivar, we were able to get basically the same amount of fruit with half the light." Mitchell confesses.

The findings show that the Seascape strawberry cultivar is a good candidate for a space crop because it meets several guidelines set by NASA. Strawberry plants are relatively small, meeting mass and volume restrictions. Since...