Bit blurry, but these Juneberries hanging from a lone couple branches underneath sheet scaffolding in a construction project down the block illustrate the urban scavenging I’ve dipped my toe into.

It started recently with mulberries we remembered in the Bay Ridge community botanical garden (a rather huge installation of neighbors that rivals many government-backed and corporate-backed botanical gardens of smaller cities). We went urban scavenging to harvest the mulberry outside our house, took our day off to pick some, only got about a cup’s worth.

Then on a Tuesday, I stopped by Central Park and found an unmarked mulberry in the midst of some other urban scavenging for linden tree blossoms. This we did for tea.

But the tree I found reminded me more of the white oaks of my childhood than the other mulberry trees I’ve found while through chainlink and in train yards and the like:

I know the chocolate was anathema for the cobbler for a lot of folks. It was weird and tart and… I kinda liked it.

Anyways, the four cups we gathered was A TON from that one tree, particularly when you considered in the process a New Zealand tourist, a couple of Ecuadorian tourists, a family of EIGHT Indian tourists, and a couple of crotchety old upper west side types all stopped, asked what I was doing, and grazed from the same tree.

Reach one, teach one, as the fabulous server from Sweet Chick in the Rockwood district always says.

This escalated, as it does with me — why stay put? Why not iterate? Why not learn all you can about what the city has to offer? Eventually I stumbled upon Falling Fruit, an app and website that crowd sources every single trackable fruit or nut bearing tree — basically anything usable from ginkgo and linden to apple and walnut:

This includes the presence of the infamous Dumpster tree:

(Spoiler: it’s just a dumpster, though it’s categorized by edibility).

Actually, one of the best nights we had was catching an industrial trashbag going to the curb from a Dunkin’ Donuts down the street. We grabbed it out of the guys hand right before he dropped them off and delivered probably a hundred donuts to the neighbor kids. They were fine: it was literally just a plastic sack of donuts fresh off the shelf. I remember a similar experience with suuuper expensive mussels on ice outside Eataly.

Anyways, this will probably increase over time and then become some of the background noise.

We of course, as we do, escalated to Fishkill farms and ended up with a ton of raspberries, strawberries, and black (and champaign) currants: