Food is free for the taking at floating 'forest' in NYC

NEW YORK -- An old construction barge planted with vegetables, apple trees and fragrant herbs is giving apartment-dwelling New Yorkers a chance to pick something and eat it.

Part floating garden, part artwork and part community organizing project, the barge called Swale is docked on a river in the South Bronx and will move to Hudson River Park in lower Manhattan from Sept. 15 to Nov. 15.

Founder Mary Mattingly created Swale in part to give New Yorkers an opportunity to forage for food, which is illegal throughout the city's 30,000 acres of public parks. The no-foraging rule doesn't apply to Swale because it's a barge.

"Because not everyone has access to healthy food in New York, I saw Swale as a tool to advocate for policy change," said Mattingly, an artist who is dividing her time between Swale and her summer residency at Monet's Garden in Giverny, France.

Swale's harvest is free for the taking. Dariella Rodriguez, director of outreach for Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, a community group that leads tours of Swale, said many visitors are surprised they don't have to pay.

"Immediately they're like, 'How much?' And when we tell them that it's free, they're really shocked," Rodriguez said.

Swale was launched in 2016 with funding from Kickstarter and A Blade of Grass, a not-for-profit that supports socially engaged art.

The hard-cider company Strongbow is providing additional support this year, including a donated "orchard" of eight apple trees.

"It aligns with our messaging because we're about bringing nature into the city," said Reggie Gustave, Strongbow's brand manager.

The 130-foot barge now is docked in the Bronx River at Concrete Plant Park, whose decommissioned concrete silos recall the area's industrial past.

The apples weren't ripe during a visit last week, but there were plenty of herbs, both culinary and medicinal. Kitchen basics such as mint, thyme and oregano mingled with sassafras, bee balm, hyssop and chicory.

There was jewelweed, known for its skin-healing properties, and wild carrot, used for centuries as a contraceptive. There were chokeberry shrubs, a native plant whose tart berries can be made into jam, as well as blackberries and blueberries.

Root vegetables such as potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes waited to be unearthed. What looked like daisies turned out to be coneflowers, also known as echinacea, the popular cold remedy.

"It grows wild all over the place," said Amanda McDonald Crowley, a curator of Swale's plants. "When you take a walk around Swale and identify an echinacea flower, you will then see them all over the city. I see weeds in the city now and recognize them as edibles. Or medicinals."

Swale's creators call it a floating food forest, not a garden or a farm, and there are no neat rows of carrots. The arrangement of trees, shrubs and ground cover plants can look random but is intended to make good use of the barge's 5,000 square feet.

A group of Kickstarter summer interns visited Tuesday and heard about the plants and also about the need for nutritious produce in a "food desert" such as the South Bronx, where supermarkets are scarce.

Intern Angela Huang said the tour was "fantastic."

A trailing plant with succulent leaves caught Huang's eye. Known as purslane, it's a common weed that can be eaten raw or cooked and is sold at farmers markets.

"When I was younger, my family and I used to take walks. My mom would walk around the neighborhood and look for that specific type of plant," Huang said. "I made dumplings with that last week."