Home gardeners often have limited space or limited soil choice or limited sun exposure so they have to grow what they can grow. Sometimes home gardeners discover that either they are really good at growing a specific thing or they just especially enjoy growing a specific thing. While it is wonderful to know how to grow a wide variety of crops it isn’t always optimal.
So what if a home gardener could grow what she/he could or wanted to grow and reach out to other home gardeners who were growing something else in quantities more than they could consume and swap crops? What if in fact the home gardener could count on being able to grow her/his favorite crop or the crop that his garden situation dictated that he could best grow because he/she had already made a deal with other gardeners to grow enough for he/she and they in exchange for something they grew?
Swapping crops is a great way to optimize the production of crops by the home gardener and to help defray the cost of home gardening. So Homegarden-Book is trying to help facilitate crop swapping. We don’t have a specific, tailor made digital application to allow a single input and matching and searching (yet!) but we do have some tools to help you seek out a crop swapping partner and advertise your extra crops.
First we have The Market. The Market is a simple classified ad module found in the Homegarden-Book Journal. You may get there by going here to the Journal login page and if you have already registered logging in and clicking the The Market link on the blue menu bar. If you haven’t created a user account yet, then it is very easy to go here or choose ‘register’ from the login page, You will be asked for a valid email address, to choose a user name, a display name, a password, and after you press submit you will receive an email at the address you supplied with a simple link to click to validate your account and you are ready to go. At the Market menu you can create a crop swapping ad and even embed a pic. You may specify SWAP only or specify swap or sell. We prefer that you keep the transaction limited to swapping crops as state and local sales tax laws vary greatly.
Another other way to Crop Swap is to join or create a crop swapping group for your geographic locale. You can post your swap request on the Group’s wall, on the group’s journal, or even create a Swap page to which you can link in other social networks if you so choose.ver how you decide to swap crops we wish you luck and if you need help on logistics email me at admin@homegardenbook.com.
HAPPY SWAPPING
