Opened by Josh Smith in March 2024, Neon Greens isn’t your typical café or bistro. It takes the idea of farm-to-table a step beyond with an additional, next-door component: a hydroponic vertical farm.

Inside the farm and its attached “Harvest Capsule,” staff tend to crops like oakleaf, mizuna, sweet crisp, kale and more. Seeds are carefully sown before being placed in the plant nursery to grow; next, they’re plugged into a lush, living wall of lettuce, where water gently trickles down, nourishing the roots.

Located in a 40-foot shipping container, the hydroponic farm embraces urban farming and sustainable agriculture techniques such as rainwater harvesting to grow up to three acres of produce. Block & Drum visitors will be able to visit the farm, smell the fresh botanicals (mint, basil, dandelion, honeysuckle), and even pick some to create a custom bottle of liquor (think honeysuckle vodka).

“We wanted to connect people to the raw natural product,” Staples explains.

In Freight Farms' latest episode of Grow Food Here, they follow Hamilton Horne, who used his experience in sales to start his own container farming business selling to local restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Farm started when we got our freight farm and when it was delivered on-site we said, you know what, why don’t we just build a restaurant onto the freight farm

Josh Smith and his team will utilize two container farming systems produced by startup Freight Farms: Situated outside the restaurant, each will able to yield about three acres of produce