Amy and Dan Urbanik share what’s growing, from basil to bachelor buttons
CM: You specialize in herbs for chefs. Do either of you have F&B experience?
AU: I’m from New York and have worked in restaurants since I was 15 with a summer job at a pizzeria. Then came fine dining restaurants in the mountains of New York—The Heron and The Settlers Inn—doing everything from managing to bartending. I moved to Savannah to be a server at The Grey and then met Dan and moved here.
DU: I left Buffalo because there was a lot of pizza and wings but not a lot of fine dining. I moved to Myrtle Beach to live with my parents, and when I saw Sean Brock on Mind of a Chef, I thought, “Wow, that’s what I want to do!” I signed a lease in Charleston three months later and wound up working for Sean at Minero as a line cook. I loved the roof garden when I worked at McCrady’s. They had flowers and herbs I didn’t even know you could eat.
CM: How did you go from using herbs to growing them?
DU: We were fortunate enough to be able to buy five acres on John’s Island in 2018. We wanted to use the land in the best possible way and knew locals like Fire Ant Farm were doing a great job growing vegetables, but no one was growing edible flowers or herbs.
AU: We wound up getting into cut flowers as well because no one was buying edible flowers during COVID. We sell bouquets at Low Tide Brewing and Mercantile & Mash, as well as on our website, and are getting into putting flowers on restaurant tables.
CM: What do y’all grow?
DU: We started out with a third of an acre of standard, 100-foot rows, about 30 of them. We grew basil, nasturtiums, and bachelor buttons because we weren’t sure what the market would be. Now, we’ve expanded to a half acre, and we have a 2,000-foot greenhouse. Over the course of the year, we grow 85 different varieties of herbs and edible flowers.
AU: We also grow tulips and daffodils, ranunculus and anemones—all of the specialty blooms you would get through a florist, though those usually aren’t grown in the US. Wouldn’t you rather have local flowers in your restaurant?
CM: What challenges did you face as a start-up?
DU: When we started The Urb Farm in August 2019, that first year was a disaster. My New York mentality was that you can only grow in the spring and summer, but I didn’t realize nothing likes to grow here in July and August. It’s not fun to sweat through three shirts during those months.
CM: What restaurants do you supply?
AU: We sell to 167 Raw, FIG, Maison, Melfi’s, Honeysuckle Rose, The Dunlin, and the Indigo Road restaurants. The Dewberry uses our edible flowers in their pastries. Marbled & Fin and the Gin Joint use our stuff at their bars.
CM: You have two young daughters; do they help with the gardening?
DU: Hopefully, one day. Our three-year-old says, “I help” and then rips the heads off flowers. Not helping! She likes to take the pile of flowers we use for compost, gather them into a bouquet, and stick them in a cup.
CM: What’s next?
DU: I want to be the go-to when someone wants something weird, and they think of me to grow it. And I want to be sustainable—not to be rich, but to live a comfortable life doing this.
