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Not sure about McMurdo, but South Pole Station has a greenhouse, which is an awfully nice place to stick your head into now and again if you're doing any amount of time there. They grow tomatoes and lettuce, among other things, that sometimes make their way into salads for folks on-station.

I've been several times to the Pole for work (years ago), and going into the greenhouse and smelling tomato plants after days on end of smelling nothing but people, galley food, cleaning products, and fuel exhaust, is a pleasant memory.

They do not (or at least did not) use human sewage for fertilizer there -- unlike at McMurdo, human waste at Pole does not get shipped off station.




McMurdo used to have a greenhouse too - it was small and homey and lovely, in one of the cargo yards. It didn't produce nearly enough food to be useful for the summer population (except maybe fresh herbs), and from memory got torn down sometime around 2010.

I wintered at Pole, and in that rather fractious winter, I think one of the worst points was when it was decided that the whole crop in the greenhouse needed to be purged. The head of maintenance had broken the Rodwell (water supply), so there was a reasonable desire to reduce water consumption. But, somehow, that morphed in to "shut down the greenhouse", despite it being a closed-loop system... That winter, we had a very comfortable reserve of fuel, and of course South Pole Station sits on a whole lot of ice.

Hi John!


Hi Ian! :-)




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