Have you ever dream ed of traveling in space? To travel in space, we first have to work out where our food will come from.
Today's space travellers don't go to the Moon or Mars. They go to the International Space Station (ISS). There, the spacemen live for weeks to months.
If you visited the ISS years ago, nearly every kind of food you ate would have come from the Earth.
In 2014,scientists sent the ISS a space garden with some vegetable seeds（种子）. With water and some light, the vegetables in the garden grew. Those were the first foods being grown on the ISS. But the spacemen couldn't eat them and had to sendthemback to the Earth. The next year, after scientists made sure they were safe, the spacemen grew a second crop. This time the vegetables were ready for the spacemen to eat.
Gardening is different in space than it is on Earth. Without gravity, plants don't know which way is up. But they learn how to grow. They send their leaves in the direction of light and their roots into the soil.
The spacemen also have grown vegetables as well as flowers. It's important to know a plant can flower in space, because flowering is part of how some plants make fruit.
While the space garden is small for now, hopefully it could one day help provide people with food on long﹣time space trips.
