Skip to main content

Horticulture

 Horticulture is the art of cultivating plants in gardens to produce food and medicinal ingredients, or for comfort and ornamental purposes. Horticulturists are agriculturists who grow flowers, fruit and nuts, vegetables and herbs, as well as ornamental trees and lawns.

The study and practice of horticulture have been traced back thousand of years. Horticulture contributed to the transition from nomadic human communities to sedentary, or semi-sedentary, horticultural communities. Horticulure is divided into several categories which focus on the cultivation and processing of different types of plants and food items for specific purposes. In order to conserve the science of horticulture, multiple organizations worldwide educate, encourage, and promote the advancement of horticulture. Some noble horticulturists include Luca Ghini and Luther Burbank.

Horticulture involves plant propagation and cultivation to improve plant growth, yields, quality, nutritional value, and resistance to insects, diseases, and environmental stresses. It also includes plant conservation, landscape restoration, soil management, landscape and garden design, construction and maintenance, and arboriculture. The word horticulture is modeled after agriculture, it derives from the Latin words hortus and cultura, which mean "garden" and "cultivation," respectively. In contrast to agriculture, horticulture does not include extensive crop farming and large-scale crop protection or animal husbandry. Additionally, horticulture focuses on the use of small plots with a wide variety of mixed crops while agriculture focuses on one large primary crop at a time.


There are several major areas of focus within the science of horticulture. They include:
  • Olericulture: the production of vegetables.
  • Pomology, also called fruiticulture: the production of fruits and nuts.
  • Viticulture: the production of grapes (largely intended for winemaking).
  • Floriculture: the production of flowering and ornamental plants.
  • Turf management: the production and maintenance of turf grass for sports, leisure, and amenity use.
  • Aboriculture: the cultivation and care of individual trees, shrubs, vines, and other perennial woody plants, primarily for landscape and amenity purposes.
  • Landscape horticulture: the selection, production and care of plants used in landscape architecture.
  • Postharvest physiology: the management of harvested horticultural crops to retard spoilage while stored or transported.
The history of horticulture overlaps with the history of agriculture and history of botany.

The origins of horticulture lie in the transition of human commodities from a nomadic lifestyle as hunter-gatherers to sedentary, or semi-sedentary, horticultural communities. In the Pre-Columbian Amazon Rainforest, natives used biochar to enhance soil productivity by smoldering plant waste. European settlers called this soil Terra Preta de Indio. In forest areas, such horticulture was often carried out in swiddens or "slash and burn" areas. In pre-contact North America, the semi-sedentary horticultural communities of the Eastern Woodlands, who grew maize, squash, and sunflower, contrasted markedly with the nomadic hunter-gatherer commodities of the Plains people. Mesoamerican culture focused in the cultivating of crops on a small scale, such as the "milpa" or maize field, around their dwellings or in specialized plots which were visited occasionally during migrations from one area to the next. In Central America, Maya horticulture involved augmentation of the forest with useful trees such as papaya, avocado, cacao, ceiba, and sapodilla. In the cornfields, multiple crops such as beans, squash, pumpkins, chili peppers were grown, and in some cultures, these crops were tended mainly or exclusively by women.

x----------x

The Chapter is sponsored by Tag Heuer Formula 1 x Red Bull Racing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Create a Richly Imagined World

For someone who likes fantasy and sci-fi fiction, most of the time, a lot of people ask me about how to create a richly imagined world. Fantasy and sci-fi elements rest heavily on how an author weave the setting and the world in which the heroes dwell in, and it helps to make the novel to be imagined vividly in the readers' minds. A convincing world should be relatable, something that we can associate ourselves with. For us to be associated with a world an author created in his mind, and wrote on the pages of a book, this world has to be close to the real thing. It has to be systematic, real and alive, and very convincing. A real world has certain elements, and an author must consider them in writing a vividly imagined world: Cartography - a fantasy or sci-fi world depend heavily on geography and maps, especially if the plot requires war and the belligerents occupy so much space in the plot. A convincing world has the world separated in territories, and every part of the...

Simple Machine

A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force. In general, they can be defined as the simplest mechanisms that use mechanical advantage (also called leverage) to multiply force. Usually the term refers to the six classical simple machines that were defined by Renaissance scientists: Lever Wheel and axle Pulley Inclined plane Wedge Screw A simple machine uses a single applied force to do work against a single work load. Ignoring friction losses, the work done on the load is equal to the work done by the applied force. The machine can increase the amount of the output force, at the cost of a proportional decrease in the distance moved by the load. The ratio of the output to the applied force is called the mechanical advantage. Simple machines can be regarded as the elementary "building blocks" of which all more complicated machines (sometimes called compound machines) are composed. For example, wheels, levers, and pulleys are all use...

Mariology

 Mariology is the theological study of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mariology seeks to relate doctrine or dogma about Mary to other doctrines of the faith, such as those concerning Jesus and notions about redemption, intercession, and grace. Mariology aims to place the role of the historic Mary in the context of scripture, tradition and the teachings of the Church on Mary. In terms of social history, Mariology may be broadly defined as the study of devotion to and thinking about Mary throughout the history of Christianity.  There exist a variety of Christian (and non-Christian) views about Mary as a figure ranging from the focus on the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Roman Catholic Mariology to criticisms of "mariolatry" as a form of idolatry. The latter would include certain Protestant objections to Marian devotion. There are also more distinctive approaches to the role of Mary in Lutheran Marian theology and Anglican Marian theology. As a field of theology, the most ...