A few years ago I was writing a (semi-)scientific paper ("Seminarfacharbeit") with two other students as part of the high school graduation process (Abitur) in

A few years ago I was writing a (semi-)scientific paper ("Seminarfacharbeit") with two other students as part of the high school graduation process (Abitur) in Germany. The general topic was water and air recycling/purification and plant nurturing for long duration space trips such as a trip to Mars. In the course of writing the paper we had access to a Mars regolith simulant with a very analogous chemical composition to real Mars regolith. We experimented with growing tomatoes, soybeans, radish, spinach and some salad variant I don't remember the name of, each with and without fertilizer. We did'nt have a lot of time and not enough regolith simulant to get significant results, but after a month tomatoes, soybeans and radish showed large growth, with sprout shoots of up to 20cm. We also controlled lighting to be more similar to Mars, although there isn't much difference in daytime lengths. Unfortunately we weren't able to control the atmosphere to be similar to Mars atmosphere, so take our results with a grain of salt.