But this day had gone perfectly. Mark took over the watch and checked by radio with the Mission Control counterpart on the outside, who had also received the Mission Control watch handed over from the previous day’s watch person.
With twenty minutes until the start of the morning work crews, we had some free time to catch up with messages on our computers, or the morning news on TV. Gaie did a quick cleanup in the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher, and turned it on. Then she brought a couple of jugs of mint tea to the plaza for morning break.
For all of us, the one-hour agriculture work began at 8:45, with five of us continuing on for another two hours. That day we weeded sweet potato, sorghum, and peanut plots in addition to routine agricultural duties. Laser, in charge of compost, began his hour by pouring several buckets of animal manure and crop residue into the hammer mill which shred the material into our compost machine and helped accelerate the decomposition process. His other responsibilities were to feed and water the worm-bed area in the agriculture basement. That morning he had brought a bucket of worms to the animal bay for the chickens. Mark’s daily routines include harvesting a bucket of the azolla water fern and cutting fodder for the animals. That morning, he cut elephant grass that had been planted along every available walkway of the agriculture area. He also gathered a bucket of canna lilies that grew in the constructed wetland wastewater lagoons in the south basement which were also used as goat fodder.
While in the south basement where the light spilled through a span of glass, Mark checked the constructed wetland wastewater system, which consisted of three holding tanks that received all the wastewater from our habitat and another set of three for wastewater from the animal bay and laboratories. When filled, the tanks were closed and anaerobic bacteria began the breakdown process. Periodically, by batches, tanks were emptied into the wetland plant lagoons where canna, hyacinth, and a dozen other plants purified the water as they grew. That particular day Mark unloaded part of the wetland lagoon to make room for new wastewater. Before starting the pumps, he checked with Jane to see if the agriculture irrigation tanks were ready to receive the treated wastewater.
Sally continued her round of vegetable harvests, thinning beets from one of our new stairwell planters and picking tomatoes from plants in tubs on the bases of the space frame pillars. Linda had been processing wheat from our last grain harvests for the past couple of weeks in the basement. The noise of the thresher prevented her from hearing the radio, so she told her ‘buddy’, Gaie, to cover any radio calls for her. It was a big world, our three-acre Biosphere, with deep waters, cliffs and hills, as well as a basement filled with mechanical and electrical equipment, so staying in radio contact was important. Having a buddy system (divers use a similar system) helped everyone keep in touch.
That day, we planned to experiment with some new varieties of lablab beans that were given to us from a research center in India. Roy was collecting beans from the first plot in which we’d tried them, and pruned them to encourage more flowering. Jane and Taber also pruned the sweet potato plants to stimulate the growth of tubers, having collected the fifty pounds of high-protein fodder we needed daily for the goats. The weeds they removed went to the compost machine, and the sweet potato greens went to the animal bay as extra fodder.
Gaie usually spent her first morning hour tending the orchard, harvesting papayas and figs, pruning citrus and guava trees, and performing checks on the marine systems before joining the agriculture crew. This included looking over the mechanical systems, as well as data such as temperature, salinity, nutrient, and pH levels. She would then take our little boat ‘out to sea’ to skim the leaves from the savannah cliff face off the surface of the water, and then clean the protein skimmers, another system that removed excess nutrients from our ocean’s water by bubbling air through pipes.
By a quarter to ten, Laser and Taber were at work on technical maintenance. They cleaned the filters on the basement air handlers that controlled climate in the savannah and installed new parts to the system that collected condensed water from the space frame glass over the wilderness areas. Gaie, Jane, Mark, and Sally continued with the peanut harvest, and while Mark and Gaie pitchforked the peanut plants into piles, Sally and Jane stripped the roots and piled the greens into separate buckets to be taken to the drying ovens at the end of the crew. These peanut greens would be used for animal fodder after weighing and drying,
At that point, Linda would have finished threshing and put the wheat grain into the drying oven. After drying, buckets of wheat grain go to the seed cleaning machine for the final separation of remaining leaves. Roy spent this second hour in the medical laboratory on the mezzanine floor of the habitat, working on a paper detailing the oxygen depletion studies he and Taber were carrying out. As work crew ended, the rest of us grabbed a food bucket or sack to carry to the elevator which went up from the orchard portion of the IAB to the dining room.
Although we had no physical contact with anyone except the other seven people living inside, parts of our lives were very public. Often groups of visitors would gather to watch us through the glass windows that separated our two worlds. Being caught in undignified positions no longer bothered us. Being without self-consciousness allowed us to work barefoot in shorts, even in the most amusing circumstances, such as splashing through the rice paddies splattered with mud while diving for the tilapia that grew there. We couldn’t hear what people said through the glass unless our ears were pressed against it and they were shouting. Sometimes people held up signs wishing us good luck, and it gave us a boost to see their smiles and thumbs-up gestures. At times when someone wanted total privacy, it wasn’t difficult to find seclusion deep within the vegetation of the rainforest, far from the side glass, or to do chores early in the morning or in the evening when visitors weren’t around.
At 10:45, a break was announced over the radio. Mint tea and roasted peanuts were set out in the plaza. For fifteen minutes, we relaxed on the carpet and cushioned benches, or on the first steps of the tower stairway, then dispersed to go on to the next of our biospherian tasks.
This was Gaie’s day to put on her wetsuit and scuba gear to ‘garden’ the coral reef: a weekly dive that included examining the overall health of the reef and fish populations, cleaning the underwater viewing windows, and removing excess algae (similar to weeding). An on-site security guard would regularly watch her through the window, acting as her diving buddy, as we were too few to have her accompanied each time. If anything went wrong, the guard would call Laser to join Gaie underwater.
While Gaie checked the coral reef, Sally moved the day’s vegetables and a week’s supply of staples (grains, tubers, and fruit) into the back kitchen to be weighed, logged into notebooks, and stored in refrigerators, grain bins, or the freezer. Then Gaie and Jane returned to the agriculture area to examine the crops for insects and disease. Sally had recently released two new types of mite predators, so she also collected a few sweet potato leaves to check on how they were doing. A microscope sat on a counter in the laundry room off the plaza for these examinations. Jane sprayed the rice paddies and grain fields with B.T. (Bacillus thurigensis), a useful bacterium which parasitizes looper worms, a harmful caterpillar, from a five-gallon backpack sprayer. This method had successfully kept the loopers under control.
By then Linda and Taber, into their second hour of wilderness operations, moved to the upper savannah to prune back the passion vines and cowpeas that were giving too much shade to the African acacia trees along the savannah stream. In the sand dune area of the desert, Mark took soil cores to measure soil moisture. On the dune sat a squat Plexiglas box nicknamed ‘R2D2’ (after the Star Wars robot), a device which continuously measured the CO2 (carbon dioxide) coming out of the soil. We moved the machine from biome to biome, to monitor how CO2 efflux changed with the seasons. The desert had its last rain a few weeks prior, and the soil had rapidly dried out, with CO2 emissions having dropped considerably. Mark took samples from the first and second foot of soil and weighed them wet before drying them in the agricultural drying ovens. In seven days, he would have to weigh them again to get accurate soil
