Winter at the Mars Botanical Garden

By 杏仁豆腐

No resupply is coming. We water the plants anyway.
An experimental botanical garden on Mars, cut off from Earth. The record of one winter, two people, and a single cherry tree.

Setting: Mars x experimental botanical garden x one winter of everyday survival

🌱 The Greenest Place on Mars

The front line of the century-long greening of Mars is the vegetation test garden Yukinoshita. Four greenhouses hold Earth crops and new Mars-bred cultivars side by side, tended by just two people: you, in charge of facilities, and the botanist Tokiwa Setsu. Six hundred kilometers to the east, Amane Base stays connected through the cheerful voice of communications operator Hinata Kakeru, every single day. But an accident at a launch site on Earth has canceled every rendezvous flight this season. With the dust storm season ahead, the garden will have to get through the winter on its own stores alone.

❄️ What to Keep Alive, and What to Give Up

Power thins day by day, and only two of the four greenhouses can be heated. The potatoes and beans are food; the medicinal herbs are the base's medical supply. So what about the cherry tree that has never once bloomed, the cultivar Akatsuki? The tree Setsu inherited from her late mentor is, on the books, nothing but a power drain. From thinning the beds to the unfinished homework between mentor and student, every decision of the winter falls to you, on the facilities side.

📻 How to Play This Story

Day-to-day cultivation and juggling the equipment, the voice on the scheduled call, and the small anomalies found at the bottom of winter. This is a slice-of-life tale where the story is built from accumulated choices rather than dramatic incidents. Outside the greenhouse is a sub-zero wasteland, but inside the glass, beans wind their vines, potatoes swell, and the dinner menu is decided by the beds. How will the taciturn botanist see your decisions? How far will the young operator on the other end of the line go to help you? Every line you write in the directive log is also a record that leads to the gardens of Mars a hundred years from now. What is left in the garden when spring comes depends on how you spend the winter.

Garden reminders (from the chalkboard in the habitat module)

One. Water gets recycled. There is no such thing as waste water.
Two. The seed vault is the last line. Touch it, and the plan is over.
Three. Scheduled call every sol, on time. A cheerful voice is a resource too.