Good evening wonderful people of Steemit and thank you so much for reading!
I'm 100% brand new to this platform and forums in general.
I have an idea... I want to share some cool information about plants with you. Hopefully someone here will find them as fascinating as I do. I also decided to take up drawing so I can create my own sustainable food paradise on paper before manifesting it to reality. Basically I'm going to be posting about awesome plants, sustainability and my attempts at drawing food systems.
Ever heard about the Aztec people?
Ancient technology is rad.
I often find myself wondering how anyone got anything done in times passed. What did they reference?! One another, their community, the elders... that's it! It must have taken so long to accomplish anything. I can only imagine. But what was accomplished in ancient times was phenomenal on multiple levels.
Are you familiar with permaculture? It is an extremely efficient way to produce food and there are a few ancient civilizations that really mastered their respective strategies.
Let's talk about the ancient Aztecs for a moment. They did not originally pioneer the floating garden method, (aka chinampas) but they sure ran with the idea once they got their hands on it.
Chinampas are small rectangular areas of land used to grow crops in a shallow lake. They are floating garden islands! How cool is that?
This method is efficiency at its finest. Aztecs dug canals through their shallow lakes and created rectangular patches of land. Willows and Cyprus trees were planted at the perimeter of the rectangles to help them hold their shape.
So that takes care of the actual "garden" aspect, but how was it so efficient you ask? Water fowl lived within the gardens eating up slugs and weeds and discarding their waste into the pond. The fish that swam through the canals fed on this waste and created their own. All of this waste and dead plant matter fell to the bottom of the shallow canals and began decomposing to create a mineral rich mud. This nutrients dense material was then periodically dug up and returned to the surface of the garden beds as fertilizer.
The plants feed the fowl, the fowl feed the fish, the fish feed the plants and all of them feed the people. It's beautiful. Mother nature has a lot going for it; she always has.
This method produced several harvests throughout the year. The construction of the canals and the usage of mineral rich mud created a microclimate for the chinampas which helped protect it against variations in temperature and droughts. It's a pretty neat system and worked to feed large populations of people.
I included my literal first drawing here. I am fan of pens. Open to your constructive criticism :)
Have a wonderful evening!
XOXO Heaven
