Inventor Uses Biomimicry to Create Dew
In harsh and inhospitable environments, with hot days and cold nights, this invention creates a temperate and moist earthen nursery for protecting and nurturing seeds into trees with a self replenishing source of drip irrigation. It is a plant incubator that’s designed to cool faster than the night air, creating condensation.
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The way nature sows seeds is ingenious. Birds eat the seed, their digestion process partly breaks them down, then they excrete them. The excretions blocks soil evaporation above the seed, providing a moist growing medium for the young plant.
That environment inspires this Popular Science Invention Award-winning Groasis Waterboxx by Lily grower Pieter Hoff.
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A circular container half filled with water (one time only) encourages condensation and dew and surrounds the earth that the seed is planted in. It doesn’t evaporate away because it is enclosed. In the center of the bucket there is a tube of earth, that is cooled and kept moist, in which you plant the seed or sapling.
A candle-like wick on the bottom of the box slowly drips small doses of the water into the soil and root system, and is replaced each night by condensation that forms on the grooves on the top and runs down into the holding tank, replacing the water lost to the drip irrigation.
This is a potentially worldchanging invention.
“In some dry areas, like in Eritrea, the average rainfall is even 1000 liters per m2 a year. Normally that water would evaporate in no time, but the Groasis waterboxx does not allow this and immediately stores it!”
As the Dutch inventor’s (translated) website enthuses: “Some hundreds of years ago the biggest part of dry land in the world was wooded. Yes! Even mountain slopes and most of the deserts”.
“Spain was one big forest. Even that big dry eroded belt south of the Sahara (for example the Sahel) was wooded. The bare dry stony Apennines in the centre of Italy had thickly wooded slopes. This kind of areas could be found all over the world. So we are not talking about prehistoric times. On the geological timescale we are talking about yesterday. That is why we do have water available in these areas.”
We just have to capture it. That’s what this does.
Source: Popular Science
Image: Groasis
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