A photo slideshow look at Both Co.'s slick aquaponics farm in Del Rey Oaks.

On the eve of Fourth of July, James Galvin celebrated a different sort of holiday: The completion of a showcase aquaponics garden flush with golden poppies, native grasses, Western honey bees, hummingbirds, dragonhead edamame, rainbow chard, big koi and gargantuan heirloom tomatoes, among other life.

The build-out process—digging the ponds, erecting the dozens and dozens of produce growing buckets, planning and testing the streams and learning everything from thermal dynamics to basic business practices—was slated to take three months. 

It took seven.

But today the student-built Both Co. farm is flowing fully, using fish waste and slick circular systems to push out lush organic produce.

The timing has started to feel more and more portentous.

Its completion syncs with the expansion of the nonprofit's first paying consulting client's plans for a huge home system. 

And with the launch of a brand new Both Co. website, which just went live.

And with the publishing of the first report on Both Co.'s admirable efforts in my column.

The seven months came with constant learning and occasional near-disaster.

On one occasion, well-intentioned volunteers accidentally crashed the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey garden farm that the Both Co. founders built, draining the pond of its water and sending its fish belly-up in front of, as Galvin puts it, “people telling us we’re going to fail.”

Only by fortune and fate they had a holding tank come online that morning at Suh's and they were able to hustle tanks of fish across town.

Then when one of the fish, a Bali shark, leaped from a holding tank and into the street, co-founder Matt Shipley was there to scoop it up and, somehow, flip its floundering and slippery mass into the bucket waiting six feet away in the truck.

More memorable moments are starting to accumulate, only with less menacing possible outcomes. 

Check out the column for word on those, view the photos and jump over to the new website for news updates, technical insights and philosophical underpinnings to the while inspiring operation.

EDIBLE: Both Co. aquaponics does smart farming with the hope of slowing thirst and hunger.