Swainway Urban Farm

Swainway is an all natural urban farm and produce company located in the heart of Columbus, Ohio. They offer a variety of organically grown vegetables, herbs, specialty crops, and seedlings.They specialize in microgreens such as pea shoots, spicy mix, and mesklin greens - and sell the best shitake mushrooms around.Very friendly people who grow with care - and I highly recommend you stop.

I took a tour of Swainway as part of an extracurricular club at my work a few years back. I learned a lot about composting, urban gardening, growing your own food, how natural farming is by nature designed to be self sufficient and is better than our nation's single-crop farm approach, along with lots of other tidbits.Mr. Swain grows all kinds of vegetables and herbs, but his number one product, the thing for which he is known, is mushrooms. While I've seen plenty of urban gardens with leafy and vine plants, I'd never seen a mushroom farm, and it was really cool! They are grown in little dirt plots that are actually not in the ground at all. He grows them on shelves and they sprout out of the dirt in 360 degrees. Another trick I learned was to keep two compost piles. Most gardeners will tell you to keep weeds and other unsavory, yet still compostable, items out of your compost heap. Mr. Swain has two - one tumbler style composter to speed things up, and then a giant compost pile at the back of his property where he just tosses whatever else he doesn't want to put in the composter. I've followed suit and done the same thing. I have a compost bin from Eartha outside my back door where I put stuff from the house, both brown and green items, as well as grass clippings. But at the back of my property, probably to my neighbors' dismay, I have a big pile where I just toss weeds, branches and other stuff I wouldn't want in the bin. although it's mostly just weeds and branches. He doesn't use any pesticides. Doesn't need them. By rotating his crops and growing something different in each plot after every harvest, pests never take root. This is how it was meant to be...literally. It's things like our government subsidies and companies marketing their products that have led to a one-crop structure that requires pesticides. Folks, I tell ya, that's JUST THE BEGINNING. But I'll hit the word limit if I keep it up. So moral of the story is, buy this guy's shit down at the Clintonville Farmers Market. He's rad.