I did a search on how to do a plant swap and must not have been using the right words, because I didn't find much.
Does anyone know of any good threads?
Thanks,
aline
Looking for threads on plant swaps
Try searching the roundup threads.
I think you want to go here.
http://davesgarden.com/trading_primer/
Check back on some previous pages on this forum. Lelan did a great hosta swap earlier in the spring and posted his 'rules'. You might be able to contact him for some guidance.
when you do just be ready to get bot overwhelmed! They are a blast! I have 15 going right now! lol
Let me know if you want a few tips!
~Noell~
I am sorry I still can't communicate this very well.
I am doing a local plant/seed swap at my house. I need to know how to co-ordinate the swapping so it is fair.
I have invited some people and we are doing a carry in lunch. I have seen threads on this but can't find the right words to do the search for them.
that I think would be like a Round Up (RU). How ever may ppl there are ... say 5... one way is to make 5 "piles" of plants one for each person and they do the same. When I go to a RU then we just talk and see what each other has and what we want... then we make trades! Some ppl like what I don't want and we can trade plants and seeds.
Seeds are easy for trading since there are so many for most plants. You can get small ziplock bags or little envelopes (from places like office supply stores) and mark them seal them and you are done.. just do a pack of each seed type maybe 5-10 in a pack for each person. If you have 5 seeds ad 5 ppl then you would have 25 little packs.
Look in the Round Up Forum. I am thinking that Is what you are looking for!
Have Fun!
aline, another thing i have seen daves people do is start listing all the plants they have ahead of time on their swap thread. then some trades are settled before people ever leave their house. esp. if people have "special" plants.
Hi Aline,
You might have found some threads from me on this desperately asking for advice. I too was all worried about how to work the trades.
Here is how it turned out. We held our plant swap in May. We invited everyone we knew. Passed out flyers to the local garden clubs and just tried to spread the word as much as we could. We had a nice sunny day and it was held in the back yard of my co-partner in crimes house, Paula.
Paula has a beautiful yard with lots of flower beds and a pond. It was a little out of the way but people seemed to find it o.k.
We decided to not go too crazy over the rules and just have fun with it. We told people to bring perennials, seeds, books or any garden decorations/garden junque they would like to trade.
We divided the booty into areas. We had a plant area, a book/magazine area, a garden junque area, and a garden seeds area.
Paula and I decided to bring a lot of plants ourselves just to make sure we had a nice assortment. We also had a newbie corner for brand new gardeners without anything to trade. In that area we had ditch lillies, common iris, spiderwort, etc. The newbies were quite thrilled to take those plants home.
We had a person sitting in the driveway with a pad of little squares of paper. When someone came they filled out a form with all of their information so we could put them on a mailing list. We counted how many items that they brought for instance if they had 5 plants, 4 containers of seeds, a book and a flower pot. They would get a slip that said 11.
They were than allowed to go into the viewing area mingle with the other gardeners and pick out 11 items to bring home.
We served sun tea, lemonade and home made cookies.
Everyone had a wonderful time and we are going to do it again in September.
We did learn some things though. One is we did not have enough help. It ran pretty smooth but Paula and I did not get to mingle with too many people and it seemed like they all wanted to talk to us and tell us how wonderful we were, lol.
I was very busy greeting people, carrying in yard ornaments and plants from cars and helping people get there trades to their vehicles when it was time to leave.
Also a lot of people said they would have rather had it in the fall when they would be dividing plants and gathering seeds.
We think maybe we could do two a year, one in May and one in September. We are also going to move it to our local farmers market which is right downtown and more accessible to people.
We were also thinking of asking the boy scouts to help us out with the carrying and toting.
We also might think of trying something different for snacks.
All in all everyone had a fun time and it turned out way better than we expected.
I might also add that people brought some great items. Many plants, some unusual seeds and bulbs, and we had stacks of really new garden books (those are expensive) and classic books. In the garden junque department one lady brought one of those big tulips made out of a tire. It was vintage from the 1960's. We had plant stands, beautiful flower pots, hoses, a wheelbarrel, lawn edging you name it, we hade it, :)
My big concern was that someone would bring great plants and not find anything worthy to trade for them but it really was not a problem.
I hope this helps,
Sue
Me again, lol. I forgot to add that we held our swap on a Wednesday afternoon starting at 3 and ending at 6.
We had about 35 people in attendence. Alot of other people would have liked to come but because it was a weekday they couln't make it.
Our next one is going to be on a Sunday afternoon starting from 12 to 4 or something like that.
Cool! I hope all was fun and went well!