2025 NOVEMBER / DEC
THE GREYTON POST
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the roadside — gravity-fed furrows that bring mountain water to gardens and smallholdings, just as they did a century ago. Every household once had its turn to divert the flow, and the community lei water turn (or quarrel about it!) was practically a social event. It’s living history — an open- air museum of irrigation in motion. Today, we have Wi-Fi-enabled controllers, drip systems that deliver water drop-by-drop, and apps that can predict rain. But the essence of irrigation hasn’t changed since the first farmer picked up a shovel: coaxing water to go where it doesn’t naturally want to. So next time you open a valve or adjust a sprinkler, spare a thought for Archimedes, the Nile farmers — and the lei water keepers of Greyton — all part of the same long and flowing story. For your watering needs: contact Les atSmart Garden Irrigation 066 216 9667
A Brief (and Rather Splashy) History of Irrigation
engineering that makes even modern hydrologists nod in admiration. Fast-forward to the present, and you’ll still find echoes of these ancient systems right here in South Africa. In towns like Greyton, lei water channels snake quietly along
invented the shaduf, a hand- operated lever with a bucket at one end — the original water-lifting gadget. A few centuries later, a clever Greek named Archimedes took things up a notch. His famous Archimedes screw — essentially a spiral tube inside a cylinder — allowed water to be lifted uphill with surprising ease. It’s said he dreamt it up to help irrigate the royal gardens of Syracuse. The same simple principle is still used today in everything from flood pumps to hydro- powered turbines. Not to be outdone, the Romans built aqueducts so astonishing that some still deliver water 2,000 years later. The Incas, on the other hand, turned their mountain slopes into sculpted terraces, channelling water neatly down from the Andes — a feat of
Les Ansley L ong before we were timers, our ancestors were already perfecting the art of getting water from there to here. The story of irrigation is a 5,000-year tale of human creativity — and stubbornness — that transformed deserts into gardens and villages into thriving communities. The ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia were the first to make irrigation fashionable, carving canals from the untangling garden hoses or adjusting sprinkler Tigris and Euphrates rivers around 3,000 BCE. Their muddy ditches didn’t look like much, but they turned barren plains into the “Cradle of Civilisation.” The Egyptians soon followed, using the annual flooding of the Nile to their advantage. They even
Drilling and developing boreholes in Greyton since 2019. AQUACORE BOREHOLES
Contact Tammy Rutherford on +27 (0)83 226 9880 or tammy@aquacore.co.za for an obligation-free cost estimate.
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