Swapping

One of my favorite parts of summer is gardening and eating fresh produce. I live in a part of the country that growing food is easy (minus the fact that we don't get a drop of rain until winter) and so backyard gardens or fruit trees are common. I have several fruit trees, but most are either too young to give much fruit yet or don't produce until fall or winter. Compared to the never ending flush of berries that comes in spring and early summer I find this month a bit dull on the gardening front. Outside of melons which we have just started harvesting, most of our garden produce has been the same produce we have been harvesting since early summer. There are only so many zucchinis you need, am I right?

Last year when I found out about a neighborhood crop swap, I found the perfect solution for the mid summer garden blues. A few times a summer our neighborhood has a large crop swap where everyone gathers together with their excess produce and they swap for things they do not grow. This is fun, but the real benefit came in meeting other gardeners to individually swap with throughout the summer or whenever new produce starts to ripen. This year I have given away tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchinis (all of which have been overtaking my counters and fridge) for lemons, nectarines, apples, peaches, pears, figs, leeks, sweet peppers and kale. It has been so successful that between swapping and picking from my own garden we haven't had to purchase produce this summer (outside of onions, bananas and a few recipe specific ingredients).

My goal in the next few years (mainly when my fruit trees start producing large quantities) is to be able to grow enough food in the summer that we won't need to swap produce even though I am sure we will still do it just for fun!