TRANSITION
LOURISH
Ethical new website lourish.com turns ‘food shopping’ into ‘food swapping’
Have you got too many tomatoes? More marrows than you know what to do with? Made pickle, filled your freezer and no idea what to do with the rest?
lourish.com – an innovative new website just launched by Cambridgeshire gardener and web
developer Dave Bower, 34 - aims to help gardeners who grow their own fruit and vegetables cope
with seasonal gluts, reduce waste, save money and cut food miles simply by helping them swap their
surplus fruit and veg with people in their local area.
“We had a glut of cucumbers in summer 2009 and after eating, pickling and giving lots away it looked
like the rest was destined for the compost heap”, recalls Dave. “It seemed such a waste of great
home-grown produce, I thought there must be people just a stone’s throw away facing a similar
dilemma who would love some fresh, healthy produce – I just didn’t know who or where they were!”.
And so the idea for lourish.com was born, a simple website to help people exchange their excess
edibles. Dave left his job as a website developer in the height of the recession and got to work
building Lourish for the benefit of gardeners everywhere.
Lourish launched at the start of August and was an immediate hit. “The response to Lourish has been
amazing, we’ve already got hundreds of people swapping not only fruit and veg like plums and
courgettes but also things like eggs, jam, seedlings and even manure” said Dave. “If people start
swapping instead of shopping, Lourish will cut waste and reduce the food miles of dinners up and
down the country – we could turn ‘grow your own’ into ‘share your own’!”
The lourish.com website is free to join and there is no cost involved for anyone to swap their produce.
It’s open to anyone over the age of 16 and members can swap anything home-produced, growable
and edible from fruit and veg to plants and seeds. Full details are on the lourish.com site.
Lourish is a social enterprise which aims to combine communities' back gardens, allotments and
smallholdings into a sustainable local food network on everyone's doorstep.
Lourish was recently featured on BBC Look East, Anglia News, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and the
Cambridge News.
The Lourish website address is http://lourish.com
The Transition Handbook
We live in an oil-dependent world, and have got to this level of dependency in a very short space of time, using vast reserves of oil in the process - without planning for when the supply is not so plentiful.
Most of us avoid thinking about what happens when oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead can have a positive outcome.
These changes can lead to the rebirth of local communities, which will grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and build their own houses using local materials. They can also encourage the development of local currencies, to keep money in the local area.
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