Ancient Hydroponics Gardens

The term "hydroponics" comes from two Greek words: cidra, meaning water, and punikos, meaning labor thus, literally "waterworks." Unlike popular belief, hydroponic gardening is definitely an ancient type of agriculture, returning 3,000 years. You will find references towards the cultivation of plants directly in water in Egyptian records dating back time from the New Kingdom and also the "Lady-King," Pharaoh Hatshepsut around 1460 BCE.

The very best-known hydroponic gardens from the ancient world were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Also called the Gardens of Semiramis, the Hanging Gardens are reputed to possess been situated near Al-Hillah in present-day Iraq, and were regarded as among the Seven Miracles from the Ancient World.

The Hanging Gardens were built by King Nebuchadnezzar around 600 BCE. His wife, Amytis, was from Media, whose everyone was the forefathers from the modern Kurds. The nation of Medea would be a mountainous one, roughly akin to present-day Kurdistan, northern Iran and Azerbaijan. Legend states Amytis grew to become homesick for that mountain tops and also the flora of her homeland Nebuchadnezzar had the Gardens built on her. Based on Greek historians of times, the Hanging Gardens, a water line brought right into a well tower, which provided water via numerous vaults for fruit trees growing inside a layer of asphalt.

Centuries later, Italian traveler Marco Polo, who apparently visited China throughout the late thirteenth Century CE and introduced pasta to Italia, said on which he known as the "Floating Gardens." Around the same time frame on the other hand around the globe, the Mexica - among the native peoples who later created the Aztec Empire of Mexico - built a town known as Tenochtitlan around the shores of Lake Texcoco. Where Mexico City stands today, the Mexica built a comprehensive community that incorporated a kind of early hydroponic system where plants were cultivated on the top of water. These early Mexican "floating gardens" were developed from necessity, because arable land was confined in the region. Known as chinampas, these were really small, artificial islands which were produced by gathering up dirt in the marshy areas highlighting the ponds. This dirt was ultimately held together by tree roots food plants were cultivated on these "islands," and were amazingly productive.

The current good reputation for hydroponics really starts in 1627, when Mister Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum was released posthumously. Within this treatise, Sausage - an British philosopher and contemporary of Shakespeare - authored concerning the cultivation of terrestrial plants without soil. Although Sausage died before his ideas might be investigated, the thought of water culture caught on being an section of study throughout the rest of the 17th Century. Through the 1860s, German botanists Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop had perfected the very first nutrient solutions for soilless agriculture, and modern hydroponic gardening was created.