Swale looks more like your typical vegetable garden than anything else, with a kind of controlled chaos. Circular beds nearly overflowing with vegetation are dotted around the entrance, some with vines that snake up trellises and others with blankets of clover and larger leafy bushes. The smaller beds give way to larger expanses of green towards the back with gravel paths meandering in between and a set of picnic tables in the center. It could be a cozy, charming garden anywhere in the country. It’s only the gentle sway of the tide moving out and the briny smell of the air that gives it away. Because Swale is on a barge in the middle of the East River.
The people behind Swale call it a floating food forest, and the title is an accurate one. All of the plants aboard Swale are either edible or medicinal in nature.
A food forest is essentially an eventually self-sustaining garden, where all of the plants work together to thrive and all are edible. This is the beauty of this concept, one that Swale is currently trying to prove the validity of in urban spaces, food forests can provide a great deal of food for a community with relatively little effort. They are in a way a more sustainable community garden that is open to all.
Visitors can come and pick the vegetables and herbs being grown on the barge for free.
Swale is proof of concept in two ways, one this it is possible to have a food forest in New York City, and two that we can do so in new and different ways. The barge is hopefully a temporary home for the food forest as the people behind it petition the city to give them public park space to create a permanent home. They envision this home being a food forest based community garden.
A Blogs@Baruch site
