Floating Fields

MANY hundreds of years ago, there lived a people called the Aztecs in Mexico. The Aztecs were well known as great warriors. But they were also very unique farmers.

The huge Lake Texcoco, around which they lived boasted of floating gardens, called ‘chinampas’. On the chinampas, the Aztecs grew all sorts of vegetables and crops.

The Aztecs built these gardens in a unique way. They first made a raft with lightweight, floating material like cane reeds and other water plants. They packed the rafts with soil and then planted the seeds. These floating fields boasted of excellent crops of brinjal, beans and corn. On some of these gardens, they grew flowers.

If you wish to see floating gardens today, a visit to Kashmir is necessary. On the famous Dal Lake in Srinagar, too, locals maintain floating vegetable and flower gardens. They use their famous shikara boats as stalls to sell the produce to visitors.

Floating gardens are not just pretty. In many poor countries like Bangladesh, where people do not have enough land for agriculture, organisations are promoting floating gardens as an alternative. Here, rafts are usually made with the water hyacinth plant, a floating water plant that is very common in water bodies. Since these gardens are mostly on the Brahmaputra river, they are kept in place by tethering them to a pole on the shore, just as you would tie a pet dog with a leash.