Hempy History and the possible "Mother of Hempy"?

jela10

Well-Known Member
I posted this back in '13 but it never saw discussion....here's some interesting hempy history.

If you have ever looked up the term “hydroponics” you will see a lot about William Frederick Gericke of the University of California at Berkeley back in 1929 and his 25’ tall tomato plants. To study even deeper about his crude techniques you will find an interesting relationship to today’s hempy style of growing and DWC (deep water culture). He started with a reservoir bucket or a lined hole in the ground of mineral enriched water with a screen atop where he placed a ‘litter’ of excelsior. He germ’ed his seeds in the litter and once the roots got a certain distance into the res, he would lift the screen a little so that air would surround a portion of the roots length. Notes were made that he could aid the airflow through the res with apertures in the side. He also knew about algae and such mentioning the need for the littler to completely cover the bin of mineralized water (nutes). The growing number of requests on how he grew the monsters lead him away from Berkeley to write a book on hydro. He claimed that he really did discover the process at home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics

As I was follower of DaliHempy who largely made the hempy method popular on another forum, (first perlite, then coco coir), I always remembered him claiming that he didn’t come up with this idea. His hempy buckets were simply a DYI version of a kit he bought when he was younger. Well, low and behold, while I was reading about Gericke above, a link took me to the writings of a young college student in 1969 named Peggy Bradley who was tired of the huge bills incurred from eating fast food. She commenced to study the writings of Gericke and grow her own veggies on her house boat. In her writing, you capture her failures and successes, but two things stand clear, the perlite and the hole in the side of the bins set to 1” from the bottom. She went on to sell kits for home cultivation and wrote her own book "Home Hydroponic Gardens". She is now the Executive Director of International Institute of Simplified Hydroponics based in Tehuacana Mexico and is working to end hunger worldwide.

http://www.simplyhydro.com/growing_your_own_food.htm
http://www.carbon.org/microfarms/peggy.htm

Could Peggy Bradley be the one who made the kit that DaliHempy bought and proliferated as his DYI hempy bucket?

If true, she might just be the "Mother of Hempy". She not only has a shot at world hunger but she also has a hand in the medicinal relief of pain and suffering via cannabis cultivation. I would love to meet this lady.
 
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