Home Care In Mars, PA

If aliens landed in Mars borough and demanded the perfect summer snack, Nick Salkeld would offer them Pennsylvania-grown tomatoes sliced and sprinkled with fleur de sel.

He’d then invite them to The Great Pennsylvania Tomato Festival at Stick City Brewing Co. on Aug. 2, where from 2 to 8 p.m., they can devour more tomato dishes and drink beer blended with fresh tomato juice.

That’s one way to achieve intergalactic harmony.

Salkeld and his Earth-loving family launched the business in 2018. It was the first craft brewery in Pennsylvania to join the 1% for the Planet movement and donate at least 1% of gross sales directly to conservation-focused nonprofits.

Nick has many fond memories of the Great Outdoors, including the bounty from his grandparents’ garden.

“Nothing was better than those fresh, Pennsylvania-grown tomatoes, among other vegetables and fruits,” he says. “I felt that this festival was a natural way to celebrate and bring that experience to folks here at Stick City.”

Another family-run operation, Brenckle’s Farms & Greenhouses, will bring loads of produce to the fest, including different variations of the marquee fruit, from grape and cherry to yellow and green. I’m a fan of the Red Deuce, a big, fat, flavorful slicing tomato that I would happily bite into like an apple.

The Brenckles have been raising crops in Butler for more than 80 years.

Amy Brenckle says they grow about 30 varieties of tomato plants for retail, with six of those planted and harvested for their fruit. They start from seed in March and, by April, they’re transplanted to tunnel houses that allow them to fruit early and longer. They’re ready to pick by the end of June and are available through the fall. I might carve a Red Deuce for Halloween this year!

Joshua Luchesa will be a Stick City dishing out pizzas topped with goods from Brenckle’s.

Last May, after years spent working at pizzerias in his hometown of Sarver, he launched the mobile Fireside Pizza Co. The pies are baked over oak-fueled flames at a lower temperature and for longer than a traditional Neopolitan, which gives the crust a nice crunch.

In addition to his regular menu, Luchesa is planning to make a pizza featuring cherry tomatoes, garlic oil, cheese and balsamic drizzle, as well as a Caprese salad and a some sort of tomato sandwich on focaccia bread . Wash it all down with a Stick City Red Beer — Stick City’s traditional American pilsner with tomato juice made in-house — while you rock out to the band Coozie.

A few weeks ago at Stick City, I greedily ate a 12-inch Margherita with fresh Mozzarella, basil, extra virgin olive oil, Sicilian oregano and classic tomato sauce(r) before any little, green guys had a chance to steal it.

Admittedly, I was a little depressed. During a nostalgia-fueled drive past my former elementary school in nearby Evans City, I was shocked to find that the building had been bulldozed. Thirty-five years ago, my “Star Wars”-obsessed peers and I grew Space Tomatoes in Mr. Waugaman’s classroom. It is one of my fondest childhood memories.

Perhaps that’s why, after staring at the rubble in disbelief for 10 minutes, I decided to find solace in Mars, where there’s a spaceship in the middle of town and they throw a bi-annual bash that coincides with the Red Planet’s revolution around the sun every 687 Earth days.

In 2014, longtime mayor and space enthusiast Glenn Hartung reached out to NASA to discuss possible collaborations; they’ve been as tight as E.T. and Elliott ever since.

After some Internet sleuthing and email exchanges, I was connected to Susan Humphrey of Park Seed in Greenwood, South Carolina, who confirmed that ’80s Space Tomatoes were, indeed, a thing and not another one of my sci-fi fantasies.

In 1983, George Park Jr., then assistant vice president of the company, joined NASA’s “Get Away Special” program, an initiative that allowed individuals and groups to fly experiments on the Space Shuttle Challenger. (In another space-related incident that is forever etched upon my brain, the vessel exploded shortly after takeoff in 1986.)

It was stocked with Rutgers California Supreme tomato seeds. Well-known, hardy and popular with backyard gardeners, they were stored in aluminum canisters and Dacron bags and sent into deep space.

Space Shuttle Columbia brought them back five years later, and NASA and the United States Forest Service kept a substantial amount for scientific research. In 1990, SEEDS (Space Exposed Experiment Developed for Students) kits, were sent to schools throughout the country.

The experiment showed that space seeds could germinate and grow, but not always at the same rate or with the same vigor as seeds kept on Earth. You can read all about it in the official report entitled “SEEDS: A Celebration of Science.”

“While space-grown tomatoes may have some differences in size, growth patterns and yield, the flavor feedback has been inconclusive,” Humphrey says. “Some researchers reported the tomatoes tasted better. Space-grown tomatoes had lower sugar levels, which affected the flavor, but it depends on your taste buds.”

Over the years of the collaboration, other types of seeds were sent beyond our solar system, but Space Tomatoes are the only plants I remember growing in fifth grade. The program was canceled after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. NASA has moved into a research phase that is more scientifically focused using internal efforts.

Humphrey says the seeds are no longer available from Rutgers, but there are likely derivatives available.

OK, so you can’t get Space Tomatoes at The Great Pennsylvania Tomato Festival, but you can eat tomatoes in a cool town with cosmic vibes, and that’s good enough for this former agricultural astronaut.

“We have arguably the best local pizza creator and local farm and greenhouse family on the premises for the day bringing it all together, simply to celebrate tomatoes,” Salkeld says. “We are lucky during this time of the year in Pennsylvania. The tomatoes that are hitting the local farmers markets or gardens are simply unmatched for quality and flavor.”

Let’s hope they live long and prosper.

Slime mold has touched down on the International Space Station — thanks to some students from Mars.

At 2:45 a.m. on Aug. 24, the SpaceX Dragon’s 33rd cargo resupply mission carrying 4,000 pounds of science and space equipment blasted off, space-bound about 250 miles away to the ISS.

Among that cargo was the aforementioned slime mold, a science experiment by five local high school students — Emily Cornish, Andrew Craig, Peyton Spera, Daniel Tabakov and Matthew Peck — who last June won a competition among other high schoolers to send their creation to space. Slime mold is a gelatinous organism with the ability to grow toward food on the most efficient path possible, and the students are testing out how a zero-gravity space environment will affect its behavior.

The students, who call themselves the “Cosmic Critters,” were among dozens of kids participating in the Go For Launch! Program by Colorado-based Higher Orbits, a nonprofit that founder and CEO Michelle Lucas said is bringing space-inspired STEM events to students’ backyards.

“I didn’t have access to this on the South Side of Chicago,” Ms. Lucas said. “There are a lot of kids in a lot of places — Mars, Pennsylvania, for example — who may love space, but don’t have an outlet to explore that.”

Higher Orbits is the program she wishes she had as a kid.

“It’s showing students there is a place in space for them, if they want there to be.” (The kids call her “space mom.”)

‘We’re nerdy together’

During the competition, Go For Launch! kids researched, drafted and pitched a science experiment for a spot on the SpaceX Dragon. They worked directly with real astronauts, including former space trotter and Navy captain Wendy Lawrence.

Students around the country competed; just four experiments earned spots on last Sunday’s space mission.

Aeroloco, another Higher Orbits team that won their regional competition out of Arlington, Va., had a similar experiment, so Ms. Lucas combined the teams, allowing them to collaborate on one slime mold experiment. Other winning experiments involve silkworms, biodiesel and sustainable food growth in space.

Emily Cornish, a senior from Butler County, said you don’t have to be a science nerd to have fun in the program.

“I just think that people are so intimidated by science when it is actually the best thing ever,” Emily said. “Growing up, I hated it because of teachers, because of school, because they made science so much like in a box, when science is all about being outside the box, and that is the essence of what Higher Orbits is.”

Everyone in the group contributed different skills, including nicely decorated presentation slides that helped them take the victory.

“We like to be nerdy sometimes, but we’re nerdy together,” she said. “We don’t leave people behind.”

What is slime mold?

“For some reason, a slime mold — despite not having a brain — can find the best possible route to get to a goal,” Emily said.

And even without a brain, it displays the capacity to store memory and communicates throughout its network by sending chemical signals. Although it’s called a “mold,” it doesn’t populate through spores, but rather acts like an amoeba and reproduces by splitting into two over and over again.

The slime mold was Mr. Craig’s idea. He’d stumbled on a video about the single-celled substance years ago, and he was fascinated by its problem-solving abilities.

“Slime mold” encompasses a large umbrella, but Mr. Craig, a senior from Allegheny County, and his team focused on Physarum polycephalum, a kind of yellowish slime mold that grows in moist and dark environments. Researchers use it to solve mazes and optimization problems — research that underpins things such as artificial intelligence and manufacturing.

It’s sometimes known as “the blob.”

The blob’s most well-known experiment was conducted in 2010 by Japanese researchers recreating Tokyo’s subway system. Using oats as nodes that represented the city’s different stations, and light (slime mold’s repellent) to replicate bodies of water, the scientists watched the mold forge its way across the mini-Tokyo terrain as it sought the most efficient paths to its food sources.

“After they gave it some time to work out the connection that it would stick with, it was just as efficient as what the humans had come up with for creating a subway system,” Mr. Craig said.

Such a feat is “pretty hard to do,” he added. “Computers have to do a lot of thinking for that.”

Zero-gravity exploration

In fact, the slime mold is more efficient than computers in solving many optimization problems.

Mr. Craig explained that the more oats or nodes added to the environment, the more difficult it gets for a computer to solve. For example, two nodes might take a computer two minutes to solve, he said, and adding a third node would increase the solve time to four minutes, a fourth node, eight minutes.

For the slime mold, the time would increase linearly with each node added. So two nodes would take two minutes, and a third node would take three minutes, and so on.

The Cosmic Critters wondered how the slime mold would act in the microgravity climate of space. Would it propagate differently? Would it emit the same biochemicals? Would it climb along the walls to reach an oat, or, without gravity holding it down, would it shoot straight up to an oat on the ceiling?

“What if we take it into zero gravity, where it won’t be as constrained by gravity just pulling it down and compressing it onto a plane, and we see what happens in space and microgravity as it crawls around,” Mr. Craig said. “Maybe you can get a different form of optimization from that.”

Emily honed in on slime mold’s health capabilities. Her parents’ careers in medicine and her own autoimmune disease drive her interest in understanding what lies behind mysterious health problems.

In space, there are higher levels of radiation, especially without the protection of the ozone layer, she noted, which makes astronauts more likely to get cancer. Researchers are exploring the possibility that slime mold’s biochemical emissions have anti-cancer properties.

The mold is nontoxic, and is an ingredient in some culinary dishes, Emily said. But she’s a picky eater, so that won’t be on her plate any time soon.

After winning the competition in Mars with their pitch, the team drafted up a three-page paper titled “Space Slime,” and posed a hypothesis:

“That Physarum polycephalum’s growth will adapt to form optimal 3-dimensional connections while continuing to produce antibiotic and anticancer biochemicals in a long-term microgravity environment.”

Professionals from Higher Orbits’ partner Space Tango handle all the research and design behind making the students’ experiments a reality, including the logistics of packaging materials for a crowded space-bound cargo resupply mission. Over the past year, students on winning teams met repeatedly with Space Tango and one another over Zoom to discuss and adjust their experiments before launch.

Over the next few months, with their slime mold orbiting all of us, the Cosmic Critters will get to see if their hypothesis proves true.

Launch Day

Crowded on bleachers at Florida’s Cape Canaveral, overlooking the SpaceX launchpad from a safe distance, Mr. Craig stood with 10 others from Higher Orbits, including Ms. Lucas. Waiting.

Countdown. Liftoff. Then, light.

“It was almost like looking at the sun,” Mr. Craig said, recalling the blinding flame. “Then, the sound came.”

That was his favorite part, how the sound built up and up the higher the rocket got off the ground, and the shaking he felt in his body even from far away. As it got higher, the rocket started to curve away, he said, when he lost it for a bit, his eyes still recovering from its light.

“And then I saw it again, because it was the only star-looking thing … moving in the sky,” Mr. Craig said.

Knowing an experiment he contributed to was on board that rocket was amazing, he said. Here in Pennsylvania, Cosmic Critters members Matthew and Peyton hopped on a video call to watch the launch livestream together. Peyton said they both expected the launch to fall through at the last minute. Right after the successful liftoff — a “surreal” moment for Peyton — the two of them went straight back to sleep.

Somewhere in the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the SpaceX Dragon capsule, which carried the first Go For Launch! student experiment and many other space materials into orbit, is on display.

This year is Higher Orbits’ 10-year anniversary. For the Go For Launch! program’s 10-year anniversary coming up in June of next year, Ms. Lucas said she will hold their 100th event in the place where it all started in Deerfield, Ill., and with the same astronaut: Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger — just one of the hundreds of astronauts Ms. Lucas trained when she worked with NASA.

And although the science from these students’ experiments across the country isn’t curing cancer yet, Ms. Lucas said, it is “real science” that will become part of a greater database of space science that will inform how humans live, work and explore in space.

It’s not about making everyone a rocket scientist, she said. It’s about exciting students “to dream bigger, to think bigger, to open their eyes to possibilities.”

“Will the science that these students are flying to space, is it going to change the world? Probably not,” Ms. Lucas said. “But it is going to change their world.”

First Published: August 31, 2025, 1:00 a.m.