So, digging into this alternative farming concept has revealed three basic non-soil methods:

— Hydroponics .. the plant sits in this inert substance and is fed by nutrient-rich water flow
— Aeroponics .. a system whereby plants are fed by spraying roots with nutrient-rich water
— Aquaponics .. this one is a bit more complex, involving fish and pumps and is probably a bit advanced for what I want to accomplish for the time being.

It’s going to be either aeroponics or hydroponics… there are a lot of different approaches for each. For hydroponics, for example, there’s the Kratky method, illustrated here:

and here:

Actually, you can go absolutely crazy watching just five-gallon bucket Kratky method YouTube videos:
just enter “bucket kratky hydroponics” into the YouTube search engine and see what you get!