Hydroponics: Growing plants without Soil: a Brief History
Hydroponics is a subset of hydro-culture, the method of growing plants without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent.
The earliest published work on growing terrestrial plants without soil was the 1627 book Sylva Sylvarum or A Natural History by Francis Bacon, printed a year after his death. Water culture became a popular research technique after that. In 1699, John Woodward published his water culture experiments with spearmint.
In 1929, William Frederick Gericke of the University of California at Berkeley began publicly promoting that solution culture be used for agricultural crop production. Gericke created a sensation by growing tomato vines twenty-five feet (7.6 metres) high in his back yard in mineral nutrient solutions rather than soil.
He first termed it aquaculture but later found that aquaculture was already applied to culture of aquatic organisms. He introduced the term hydroponics, water culture, in 1937, Hydroponics is derived from neologism υδρωπονικά, constructed in analogy to γεωπονικά, geoponica, that which concerns agriculture, replacing, γεω-, earth, with ὑδρο-, water.
Advantages of Hydroponics
Growing with hydroponics comes with many advantages, the biggest of which is a greatly increased rate of growth in your plants. With the proper setup, your plants will mature up to 25% faster and produce up to 30% more than the same plants grown in soil.
Your plants will grow bigger and faster because they will not have to work as hard to obtain nutrients. Even a small root system will provide the plant exactly what it needs, so the plant will focus more on growing upstairs instead of expanding the root system downstairs.
All of this is possible through careful control of your nutrient solution and pH levels. A hydroponic system will also use less water than soil based plants because the system is enclosed, which results in less evaporation. Believe it or not, hydroponics is better for the environment because it reduces waste and pollution from soil runoff.