Craigslist for Local Fruits and Veggies

How great would it be if there were want ads in your local newspaper or on Craigslist for organic fruits and vegetables, grown in your town, by your neighbors? A new website - Veggie Trader has sprung up that offers exactly such a service, a purchasing and bartering clearinghouse for locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Veggie Trader describes itself the "place to trade, buy or sell local homegrown produce". The idea is simple, you register on the website and then can offer to purchase, to sell, or trade any manner of surplus fruits or vegetables. If you have too many tomatoes and want to see if anyone nearby has a surplus of peaches or peppers, you can log on, run a search, and find out who in the neighborhood may be willing to exchange with you.

It's a great way to offload additional produce and exchange it for something that you might be unable to grow in your own yard. It's totally free to join, and costs nothing to post an offering, or place a wanted listing.

The website only started four months ago, and is definitely still in its infancy. Despite that, they have over 6,000 people signed up so far. The folks who have registered thus far are concentrated on the West Coast in California and Oregon, but since the website is still starting out, it could very well extend eventually to your neighborhood. You can help make the website grow by registering and offering to buy, sell, or trade for whatever produce you have or may want.

Veggie Trader has ambitions to expand to include dairy, eggs, and meat, all items that are heavily regulated. Given the nature of government regulation of these foods, this may be overly ambitious, but we can't fault them for trying. The future may hold great things for Veggie Trader, only time will tell if the site can attract enough members to gain enough momentum to make a difference, but we're certainly rooting for them.