>>11614016It's literally just sand and rocks, anon. You can do the experiment yourself, go get some sand and rocks, wash the organic matter out because that's cheating, then plant whatever seeds you can get your hands on. 99.9% of crops won't grow, a good amount of non-food species will. It doesn't really matter though, because for one thing there are a number of crop species that you can grow using hydroponics alone, and for another it'd only take a few weeks for a perennial grass plot to be ready for first harvest, and a few weeks after that you'd have some still-shitty but workable soils that you could plant crops in. Remember, on Mars we're doing everything indoors, so seasons follow our schedule.
>>11614038>Plants also uptake a huge amount of bullshit chemicals from contaminated soils.Yes but I'm just assuming that we're going to treat the dirt we dig up by washing with water first anyway. It's not that soil remediation requires anything more difficult than a wash plant, it's that a wash plant is more expensive than just planting four sunflower crops on contaminated land on Earth. On Mars that option actually becomes more expensive, so we'll just do it quickly ourselves. Tailings from excavation through bedrock shouldn't contain toxins anyway, it's just basalt, so if we're willing to pulverize it a bit more we can produce very serious amounts of soil 'skeleton' material without real difficulty.
>>11613988Sorry, the sun came out but the glass fogged up, here's a pic of one of the little dudes in there instead. It's at least 2nd generation by the way, the isopods reproduced last summer when it was warmer and the plants were growing faster than they are now.
