HYDROPONICS – whats it all about.

The meaning of the word Hydroponics is taken from the Greek words hydro meaning water and ponos meaning labour. It is a method of growing plants by using mineral and nutrient solutions without the use of soil. Plants may be grown with their roots in the mineral nutrient solution only or in items such as perlite, gravel, or mineral wood.

In normal soil growing conditions, the soil is basically a reservoir for nutrients, but the soil itself is not essential to plant growth. Hydroponics is a way of artificially getting the nutrients to the plant without the soil via the roots being able to absorb them. Remember yourself as a child, or even your own children at school doing the watercress on cotton wool or similar and keeping the wool moist, this is exactly the same process only on a bigger scale.

History

Hydroponics has been recorded back as early as the Aztecs, but the mineral nutrient solutions used today were not developed until the 1800s. The earliest known published work on growing terrestrial plants the hydroponics way, without soil, was a book by Sir Francis Bacon called Sylva Sylvarum in 1627. After much research by various people a man called John Woodward published his research and experiments with spearmint. It was not until the 1860’s when ‘Julius Von Sachs’ and ‘Wilhelm Knop’ who were both from Germany, perfected mineral nutrient solutions and became known as solution culture. It then became a standard teaching practice and is still used today.