Foraging for supper ingredients inside NYC parks could get you slapped with a fine or at the very least admonished by a Parks employee. Plus the threat of dog pee (or worse). Swale, a floating edible forest returning to the New York waterways for a second year, allows for picking produce without fear of the law or anything scary lurking in the underbrush.
Founder Mary Mattingly started Swale in 2016 by terraforming an old construction barge, and filling the space with soil and plants that were either edible/medicinal or flowers that are good for pollinators. The barge traveled to the Bronx, Governor's Island, and its current home at Brooklyn Bridge Park's Pier 6, inviting anyone to come on board to lounge amidst the flora and pluck whatever looked tasty to take home to eat.
This year, Mattingly partnered with the Strongbow hard cider company, which supplied Swale with an influx of funding to grow their food forest and add an "apple orchard." Situated on a small mound are eight different apple tree varieties—Newtown Pippin, Goldrush and Northern Spy, among others—that will eventually bear fruit this fall. There's a small path built into the grove where visitors can take a hike and, eventually, pluck an apple from a tree.
In its first year nearly 60,000 people visited when Swale sailed into their communities. Mattingly says that while visitors took advantage of the free food, plants were able to grow back and some people even brought seeds and plants of their own to donate to the forest. "It doesn't get over foraged, people are actually very generous with the amount they pick, so sometimes I encourage people to pick a bit more," says Amanda McDonald Crowley, one of the forest's curators. "That's not enough bok choy for dinner tonight!"
Swale will travel the rivers throughout the spring and summer, docking back in the Bronx, as well as possible stops in Sunset Park and maybe a journey to the Hudson River. It will be open noon until 6 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays, with special events planned throughout the season. (Details here.)
Even if you aren't looking for some lovage for your salad, the space functions like another green space or park for urban dwellers and something they can interact with in a meaningful way.
"It's an experiment to see how it could work to have a 'commons' in New York City, because that's so rare. Our theory was that we don't have enough opportunity to care for public space in New York City, it's something that we think other people do," Mattingly explains. "There's this philosophy that there can be a 'tragedy at the commons,' which means it'll just be over-foraged or over-picked. But I think we're trying to say by doing this test—and hopefully by it being a great example—that usually that's not the case. Usually people want to care for things, we're just not given that many opportunities to do so."
