Bronx food forest launches free foraging series in Concrete Plant Park

The Bronx River Foodway opened another season of public foraging education at Concrete Plant Park, with Bronx River Alliance and NYC Parks launching Foragers in the Foodway on June 27, 2026. The free biweekly series runs from June through September and brings NYC foragers and herbalists into the Bronx’s only edible food forest, where participants learn to identify wild and cultivated edible and medicinal plant species and then preserve and use what they harvest.

That format matters in a borough where access to fresh food is uneven and where foraging knowledge is rarely passed down through private land, family property, or easy trips out of the city. The Bronx River Foodway was developed by NYC Parks in 2017 on the footprint of a formerly abandoned concrete factory along the Bronx River, and the agency describes it as its first edible public food forest. Its plantings include medicinal plants, native berries, and familiar vegetables, a mix that lets beginners see how an edible landscape is built without having to guess at what is safe in a patch of woods or an empty lot.

The public-health backdrop is stark. The launch materials noted that roughly one in three Bronx children faces food insecurity, and that in neighborhoods such as Belmont and East Tremont, bodegas outnumber supermarkets by 37 to 1. Bronx River Alliance’s Foodscape page for Belmont and East Tremont ties that shortage of affordable, nutritious food to higher risks of food insecurity and chronic disease. In that context, the Foodway is not just a gardening project. It is a place where city residents can learn food literacy, seasonal stewardship, and the basics of reading a landscape before they ever try to harvest from it on their own.

Bronx River Alliance says the Foodway is meant to “jump-start the imagination” about new ways to use urban land, and the series’ backers include New York State Agriculture and Markets. NYC Parks also set up a separate Foodway tour on June 26, 2026, with Bronx herbalist and forager Journei Bimwala, underscoring how the program pairs access with mentorship. For mushroom foragers, that is the real lesson of Concrete Plant Park: the city can teach beginners how to look, learn, and harvest carefully, but it works best as a supervised ramp into the practice, not a license to start self-picking anything unfamiliar.