NASA plans to start a garden on the Moon next year!

It’s a great time to be alive when all of the cliches seen in sci-fi movies time and time again are starting to become a reality.

Men landing on the moon, versatile rovers roam Mars and now we’re just a couple years away from starting plant life on our neighboring celestial bodies.

Arabidopsis is a small flowering plant that is closely related to mustard or cabbage, both useful when trying to colonize another planet ecologically. More importantly, it contains one of the model organism that is key for studying plant biology, especially since it’s the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced.

NASA, the American space agency, set its sights on Arabidopsis to be part of the first garden on the Moon and Mars. Ambitiously, NASA plans to have it planted on the Moon by 2015, as in next year. Mars isn’t that far behind with a target date of 2021.

This very well could be the first step of plans to one day send men and women to live on distant worlds, hopefully with food and water already set up for them.