The Swale: New York’s floating urban food forest
New York’s Swale is an urban food forest that is built on a barge on the Hudson River. This sustainable community garden provides a free harvest for people who are in need of fresh and healthy food. This is an innovative and a smarter way of using urban commons that the city’s population can be sustainably benefitted from.
Built on an idea conceived by an artist, Mary Mattingly (as cited in Mann 2016), the Swale has been created on a 80 X 30 foot floating platform on water to get away with New York’s ban on food distribution gardens on land. “The forest will include more than 80 species of trees and plants, from wild ginger and raspberries to asparagus and arugula, and will travel from pier-to-pier every few weeks,” writes Mirele Mann (2016), an editor and writer for Goodnet. According to “The Barge” (n.d.), Swale’s planting strategy was influenced by “edible forestry, permaculture, and salt-tolerant estuary ecosystems,” with the plant community consisting of “perennial native fruit trees and shrubs, leafy self-seeding annuals, and salt-loving grasses.” Accordingly, this will be a relief for over three million people who live in food deserts in New York City and have limited access to fresh produce (ibid.).
The artist, Mattingly, claims that this floating food garden can float from one dock to another so that many people can pick their own food free of charge. This colorful urban food farm is sucking up water straight from the river and also cleaning up the river. Erin Blakemore (2016) says that Swale not only places a food forest but also provides a public urban space for performances and public workshops that teach plant ecology taken straight from the plants. It’s no wonder that this forest garden produces a remarkable ecosystem too.
Reference: Blakemore, E. (2016, Apr 18). New York’s Newest Urban Farm Floats. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-yorks-newest-urban-farm-floats-180958764/.
Mann, M. (2016, May 17). New York’s New Urban Farm is Built to Float Along the Hudson. Goodnet https://www.goodnet.org/articles/new-yorks-urban-farm-built-to-float-along-hudson.
Swale: a floating food forest. (n.d.). The Barge. Retrieved Jan 30, 2023, from https://www.swalenyc.org/new-page.
