I'm not sure if any of these plants other than the aloe would have benefitted his stay on Mars. The aloe has a lot of uses so maybe it would have been helpful in some ways, but a lot of plants for bio-diversity purposes and oxygen production is a good thing too I think.

That's a wild story about your grandma's aloe. Hopefully you didn't get scolded too much for that, you were trying to "enrich" them after all. 😂