Mark Watney in The Martian had a tough time growing potatoes on Mars but so did the crew trying to grow space plants on Veggie  a vegetable production system being tested on the International Space Station (ISS) since May 2014. Now that the imperative movie reference is out of the way, you have to realise that growing plants in space is actually tougher than it would be on Mars. Because there’s no gravity. Well, there is this faint gravitational pull astronauts call micro gravity, but it hardly helps.

 
Which is why it was a minor miracle when ISS astronaut, Scott Kelly posted a picture of a zinnia, the first flower grown in space, last week.