Food Swap

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Our local permaculture group has started a food swap which is held twice a month at a cafe within our community. If you haven’t been to one, or heard about how it functions, the way it works is that you take something from your garden that you have grown or something that you have produced from food from your garden, and you swap it with someone else’s produce. All the food and other interesting things were laid out on a central table and people milled around and decided what they wanted to swap and take home.

The cynical amongst us might think that people would bring a little and take a lot, but I honestly didn’t see any evidence of that, if anything, people were more generous in giving than in taking. I took along some herbs from our garden, a jar of tomato chutney and a jar of strawberry jam. The chutney was made with tomatoes from our garden and the strawberry jam was made with strawberries that I picked up cheaply at my favourite farmers’ market. Here’s my bundle of freshness ready to be swapped:

After meeting some enthusiastic gardeners, enjoying some delicious lemon and almond cake (which someone else baked to swap!) I came home with this:

Some parsley – I plan to make pesto out of that, two beautiful limes, a couple of cos lettuce leaves, some jerusalem artichokes with advice on how to cook them, and some homemade quince paste! What a great way to widen the diversity of food that we have access to, meet some interesting people and spend a while chatting with like minded people.

Well done to those that took the initiative to get it started and thanks to the lovely cafe owners who kindly opened their doors and warmed their coffee machine to help make it happen.