The light-fingered might take advantage of the honesty box, but for the creative cook it provides a roadside recipe challenge
Our garden is fairly dinky: no room, really, for veg, though at one end there does stand a senior and increasingly frail-looking plum tree. Nevertheless, this year we have an unaccountable surfeit of green stuff, some flowers having self-seeded to an almost freakish degree. Digging up a few, Derek, who visits once a year in order bravely to wrestle our triffid-like wisteria, pondered what we might do with the rest. “Maybe you should put an honesty box out front, and try to sell them,” he said. What? I gave him a narrow look. Dishonesty box more like. That very week, someone had gone to the trouble of nicking a five-inch-long strip of lead from the roof of our crumbling coal hole. That, too, is out front, trying hard to look dignified among the ketchup-smeared polystyrene cartons chucked in its direction on a seemingly almost hourly basis.
I went inside, thinking mournfully of that semi-mythical place, the country, where shiny people in ebullient wellingtons would doubtless be more than willing to hand over their spare change for my mighty agapanthus. But no! Moments later, on to my screen it came: an everyday story of Norfolk farmers and the trouble they’d had with their honesty box. In Wymondham, David and Julie Barber have grown so fed up with people taking eggs without paying for them (about 40% of their produce, they reckon, was essentially being nicked), they’ve taken drastic action. Outside their farm is a newly installed vending machine. Henceforth, eggs will be released to customers only once payment has been safely received.
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