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The first week has gone very well.  I am adapting to the diet without any trouble, and the food is holding up better than expected.  It looks like we will be a little out of balance in terms of vegetables vs potatoes.  I think I'm going to have a lot of vegetables left over.  Next year we should plant more starches and less vegetables. 

Some crops did very poorly.  The wheat, though not to bad in terms of normal wheat production, was still not very good compared to potatoes.  Our onions didn't do very well; we must be doing something wrong because about the biggest onion we've ever gotten is 2".  Suggestions, anyone?  Our best cauliflower has a HUGE plant, but hasn't produced any cauliflower yet; we have another month so hopefully we'll end up with a big head and a couple small ones.  The germination rate on the Royal Chantenay carrots was really bad, though those that did germinate did quite well.  The Nantes half-long carrots germinated fine, but are pretty small carrots. 

Our potatoes, as usual, are the stars.  Our yield looks like it is going to be comperable to our last closure (2002 productivity paper).  The cabbage did fine, though not as big as most Alaskans would expect.  The lettuce is great, as are the turnips.  Beet productivity looks ok (especially considering it wasn't a very good [ie shady] location).  The sunflowers weren't planted early enough, though there is time yet and if they do produce it'll be bountiful.

Over the last week I ate a variety of foods; potatoes were by far the most of anything.  The big four after potatoes are cabbage, carrots, tomatos and turnips.  Onions went into quite a few dishes, but more as seasoning than as bulk.  I logged everything I ate so I could analyze my diet.

When I started I was not set up to sterilize human wastes, so this was one of my first projects.  I'm not entirely enthusiastic about the results, but it is working.  More experimentation next year.

I have kept a diary over the week; here are some extracts:
9/18/04  Day 1.
2 pm.  I entered Mars Base Zero and locked the door behind me.  Then Frankie stapled the tape across the door so it couldn’t be opened from the outside.  I needed the staple gun so she went around front and passed it back through the plastic, which I then stapled shut.  So now I’m shut in until I run out of food!

9/19/04  Day 2
For breakfast I dug up a potato and cooked it in the microwave.  I also ate a carrot.

I decided on a heavy lunch, digging another potato plant and making mashed potatoes (just boiled and mashed them).  I also picked 3 tomatoes and cooked them with a few grams of parsley to make a sauce for the potatoes.  Alas, I didn’t like it much.

9/20/04 Day 3
I spent the morning being useful.  I looked over the seed packages and found that spinach matures in just 38 days (probably needs to be pretty warm though) so I planted half the tray I’d planted the radishes in (I didn’t have space on the heat pad for more planting trays), and will pinch off the radishes when they come up.  I also blocked off the air leaks along the west wall (stapled the visqueen to the wall), which wasn’t leaking too bad, but every little bit helps.  Don’t really need it today, for it is in the 50’s outside.  I also cleaned and washed the counter—something it was sadly needing.

9/22/04 Day 5
The wheat that I had started to cut yesterday had been seriously attacked overnight by mice.  So I finished harvesting it, and took half of it and spent the majority of the afternoon working on analyzing it.

9/23/04 Day 6
It had been snowing hard when I woke up.  A little bit was sticking to the plastic, so I turned the heat up a bit to melt it off.  The snow quit by noon, but then the wind picked up a bit and tended to blow the plastic around.  Which helped removed the leaves that had been sticking.  I have to keep an eye on the plastic because it is not super well secured at the top, and too much weight will pull it down.

9/24/04 Day 7
I hadn’t eaten very much calorie-wise yesterday (I ate until I was stuffed, but the calorie density was so low I only managed to stuff down 1,000 kcal!), so I fried up a huge (3 pounds) batch of potatoes.  This made for both breakfast and lunch.  I still wasn’t very hungry by dinnertime, so I made a salad and a small amount of potato soup.  Turned out to be just right.

Over the last week I've had a lot of questions asked about live in here, so I thought I'd make the answers available so you can get an idea of what life is like inside.  Questions are very much appreciated, partly because it makes it easy to write these updates!  So do send me more!

9/25/04
Ray C,
Mars Base Zero inhabitant

 


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