If you grow your own fruits and vegetables in your garden and often find that you have a bumper crop that you cannot eat all yourself then you are the type of person that can make use of Lourish.com.
Lourish.com is a new website which helps people to swap home grown food. It is the food gardeners equivalent of Freecycle, but you exchange rather than just give away.
The site is in its early days. Although the domain was registered several years ago its current format is only a week old. Already it has reached the national news in the UK with a feature on the BBC.
The idea is that you contact other growers through the website to arrange to swap food in a setting of your choice. The founder of the website said that most people meet at a pub or in each others allotments or gardens to swap food.
This is another Internet service that is providing a real service that common people can utilise and benefit from. Like Freecycle it provides a portal for people to share unwanted goods without costs.
However, there may be a slight hiccup. Like other business start-ups that reach the national news its website is struggling with demand. Currently there is a “503: Service Temporarily Unavailable” error message on the site. A similar thing happened to Worthenshaws after Dragons Den made them popular overnight. David Bower is the founder of Lourish.com and he may soon find that he needs to upgrade his web hosting to allow for the stampede of hungry allotment holders armed with courgettes and cabbages that are keen to share their crops. (site back up now).
One other issue – it is really new. Just looked for exchanges close to me, and there are none lwithin about 30 miles of Chelmsford, Essex at the moment. Oh well, I will have to eat all these apples myself!
