community barter

something i've always dreamed of is being self sufficient. it's a little more complicated than just growing a few veges, and while we may be able to have our little urban homestead we will never be fully selfsufficient on 500m2. we can try. we've planned and built a vege garden with fruit trees, we have chickens and we dream of bees. we've small pencil sketches of solar hot water heaters and solar ovens, but we'll never be 'off the grid'. we can't produce milk, nor wheat, nor chocolate!

but we can swap!

our neighbourhood edible garden network has set up a weekly swap-meet for all things edible. the philosophy is if you've produced it, bring it along!
all week i'd been chewing over what i could take along to swap. what have we got in abundance? at the debut to spring we've mostly got hope, but we can't swap that!

but a quick look round and we thought- ok, we've got chickens, we've got a fab lemon tree, i've got some chutney made from last summer's tomatoes that we'll more than likely not use... and so to this weeks swap-meet we took along just that: eggs, lemons, chutney and some heirloom courgette seeds. we returned home with some silverbeet (both cut and plants) some radishes, some rosemary, 2 bottles of homebrew beer, 2 loaves of bread, some sunflower seedlings and some parsley. what a swap! our little blue eggs went down a treat! (we were even asked if we were likely to get any little blue chicks...) we swapped ideas and orders for next time- yoghurt, french bread, seedlings, more lemons and of course, more little blue eggs!

and so it's like this, little by little, that we work towards selfsufficiency. so we can't grow wheat, but we can swap our eggs for some bread.

all that's really left to do is to find someone in our community who grows chocolate!

xx
mama b