Gardeners grow dinner with aquaponics

Unless you are Alice Waters or Barbara Kingsolver, planting and maintaining an edible garden can seem a tad arduous. In her book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Kingsolver extolled the pleasures of home-grown food, but all the soil amending, weeding and watering - not to mention controlling greedy pests - takes time, effort and, of course, space.

Enter aquaponics, a system of food gardening that has a small but growing fan base, not least because its advantages seem almost too good to be true. An aquaponics installation requires no soil, scant water (2 to 10 percent of what is used in the average vegetable garden), a modest financial outlay and minimal maintenance. There's no dealing with pesticides, and the system is sustainable and easy to set up. For gardeners conscious of the need to slash their water use during California's drought, or those with little or no land, this method has a lot to offer.

The cherry on top is that you get to enjoy nurturing a school of pretty fish. Fish can be fed with regular fish food or, eventually, with the fruits of your crop, creating a virtuous circle in which you know precisely what is going into the food you eat. Whether you consider your fish a decorative feature or dinner is up to you.

"My wife and I were blown away when we saw aquaponics for the first time," says Bob Rudorf, who has a system installed under a grow light in the living room of his Sonoma home and is harvesting baby lettuces and culinary herbs.

Aquaponics combines hydroponics, or water-based planting, with aquaculture, or fish cultivation. The idea is simple: In a closed-loop system, water from a tank full of fish, rich with fish waste, irrigates and feeds plants that grow in a bed of gravel. The plants filter the water, which is then channeled back into the fish tank. The boxed plant bed is typically set at table height to distance it from soil-borne diseases such as the fungi that grow on tomatoes, but there's another benefit: no need to bend or kneel to tend your plants. Aquatic life can range from goldfish, trout and tilapia to crustacea, frogs and turtles; a simple pump is required to circulate the water. Plants can be grown from seed or as transplants that have been cleaned of soil.

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