RENO, Nev. — After a visit to Nevada Naturals, you might never look at salad the same way again.

Tom Blount, who owns Nevada Naturals with his brother, John, guides a visitor down greenhouse rows brimming with microgreens and lettuces grown hydroponically — that is, in a nutrient solution instead of soil. He snaps off leaves here, flower buds there, offering up everything for tasting.

Wild Japanese spinach delivers a peppery finish. Bronze fennel leaves have a sharper licorice flavor than familiar fennel bulbs. Merlot lettuce is intensely bitter and smudged purple-green. Micro basil furnishes a powerful perfume. Minuscule mustard flowers seem mild at first, but three bites in — whoosh! — the heat arrives.

And then there is the variety of mint that tastes like a blend of mint and, yes, chocolate.

"You could make a nice mojito out of it," John Blount said, laughing.

The brothers Blount, refugees from the restaurant business, founded Nevada Naturals in 2006. In their two greenhouses, soon to be four, they grow 21 varieties of lettuce and 24 microgreen varieties, as well as basil, tomatoes, peppers and strawberries.

Nevada Naturals yields about 200 pounds of produce per day from some 32,000 plants.

This yield, the brothers said, requires only 25 gallons of water, a fraction of what would be needed with conventional agriculture. Hydroponics, the Blounts continued, conserves land and doesn't use chemical pesticides.

LESS FUEL, TOO

Locally grown hydroponic produce also requires less fuel to ship. The Blounts sell their produce at farmers' markets and to a handful of area restaurants.

With the growth of the local foods movement and their increasing production capacity, the Blounts hope to widen their distribution. Hydroponics could be the future of agriculture, they said, especially in the desert climate of northern Nevada.

Nevada Naturals leases greenhouse space at the University of Nevada's College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources.

"It offers a great opportunity to train students in hydroponic vegetable production and a great opportunity for research and evaluating the possibility of growing vegetables hydroponically year-round in Reno," said Ron Pardini, associate director of the university's Agricultural Experiment Station.

The Blounts use an ebb-and-flow hydroponic system in which organic seeds are started in a rockwool growing medium and then transferred to plastic rain gutters with plant holes drilled into them.

A pump circulates an oxygen-rich nutrient solution three or four times a day. Excess is collected in barrels for reuse.

U.S. LAGGING

When Nevada Naturals has all four greenhouses up and running, three will use a new system in which trays containing rows of plants will float atop 6 inches of solution. The fourth greenhouse will be devoted to aeroponics, a growing method in which plant roots are suspended in air and sprayed with nutrient mist. Tomatoes take especially well to aeroponic growing.

The Blounts predict that the four greenhouses will yield about 10,000 pounds of produce a month.

Israel, Australia and the Netherlands are leading the way in broad-scale hydroponic agriculture, but stateside, hydroponics has had a harder time gaining traction.

The conventional food and farming lobbies are strong, and "farmers tend to keep on doing what they've been doing for generations," Tom Blount said.

Plus, federal farming grant and loan guidelines have only recently been changed to allow more hydroponic growers to apply for funding.

If the environmental arguments for hydroponics aren't sufficient, growers can always appeal to the palate, Tom Blount said.

Imagine local tomatoes, juicy and truly vine-ripened, available almost any month of the year.

With hydroponics, it's possible.