Plants grown in space (was Hemp)

> > While we're on this subject, are there any experiment on growing
> plants in
> > space yet?
>
> There were experiments in MIR. If I remember correctly the plants did
> poorly. The lack of gravity confused the up-down growth pattern.

From what I've read, a lot of the problems that the plants had on MIR were probably due to problems other than lack of gravity. The specific problem that was looked at is an increased concentration of ethylene which cause sterility in the seeds. There were also problems with lighting and air flow.

Sorry, I don't have a reference for this but I've been doing a fair amount of research (web and journal articles) on plant-based life support systems and can't remember where I read this one. The main point of the article though, was how to overcome those problems on the ISS so that we could really test the affect of gravity, as opposed to other experimental variables.

Andrew