Why Fruit Exchange?

Inspired by years of musing over this idea and the project detailed at Forage Oakland, Alameda Fruit Exchange is a practice and a project designed to knit together community through sharing of home-grown edible fruits and food -- a way to strengthen both the ties between people and deepen our connection to food.

Are you dealing with what feels like an overload of citrus? Later in the year, do your trees cover your yard with more fruit than you know what to do with: mountains of apples, floods of plums, an abundance of apricots? Join Alameda Fruit Exchange and participate in community building. Stop wasting food!
Whether you have too much or too little, Alameda Fruit Exchange is a way to build community and end the waste of the bounty of fruit growing in Alameda’s yards. Trade your autumn walnuts for your neighbor’s summer plums. You get connections all over town – one member’s persimmons become the line to another’s Santa Rosa plums, and on to someone else’s olives. If you don’t just want other fruit back, we can preserve it or teach you how. Don’t have fruit? Trade your harvesting or jam-making skills for a share.

How does it work? If you have fruit in your yard, and want to offer some or all, sign up over on the sidebar and let us know, absolutely free. Volunteers will pick as little or as much as you want and then list the fruit as “available” to other members.

Eventually, we’ll turn big excess into jams, chutneys, and marmalades. We’ll offer food-preservation workshops, so that skills will become tradeable as well as food. When other fruit is in season, you get to share in that bounty.

Join at no cost, and reap the benefits of Alameda’s rich diversity of homegrown food, build connections with one another, and prevent the waste of locally-grown produce.