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.

For a few moments, something inside me died. I came late to the honesty-box party: when we holiday in Britain, invariably we head north where, thanks largely to the weather, such things tend to be less of a feature than in the south (if you’re chasing down peas in rural Yorkshire, you’d best head straight for the freezer section of the local Spar, while if it’s a squash of distinctive shape and colour you’re after, well, good luck and do remember how long it took Odysseus to reach Ithaca after the Trojan war). I’m pretty sure I only clapped eyes on my first serious honesty box – a hobbit-sized house painted a delightful Farrow-&-Ball-ish green containing not only one of the aforementioned squashes but also bunches of dahlias and jars of jam – about five years ago, when friends of ours moved to Suffolk. It was so lovely – and so spacious – I was half-tempted to move in.

But then another, more optimistic feeling began to tug away at me. It’s awful that the Barbers were losing some £150 a week. Still, they also keep 16,000 hens: for them, eggs are business; most of theirs are sold to the supermarkets. I don’t suppose the garden-gate vending machine will turn out to be a trend, or even that people will give up the idea of selling their spare produce altogether. Most honesty box owners are, after all, merely hobbyists. The small bag of beans, six green tomatoes and three geranium cuttings on sale at the end of their drives aren’t designed to generate income (though it’s a bonus if they do), but to give them a nostalgic and deeply pure shot of shopkeeping pleasure. With just one successful drive-by – sold to the slightly smug couple in the Citroen Cactus, two large and comically bent cucumbers – the Fisher Price cash register they played with as a child appears once again in their mind’s eye.

And this, it goes without saying, works both ways. The person who stops at an honesty box – or, even better, makes a detour to pass one they know to be reliably bountiful – isn’t shopping, exactly. They’re playing house. Who, after all, really needs yet another jar of chutney? What, in the end, is to be done with a single courgette? What we’re talking about is culinary orienteering for the Pinterest generation. Today’s challenge: construct a simple three-course dinner using ingredients sourced entirely from the five honesty boxes located between X and Y. These boxes will be marked on your maps, and in real life, by red gingham bunting. Extra points will be awarded to those who do something truly imaginative with some waxy, yellow beans and the sticky contents of their holiday cottage pantry (though not – please note – the ingredients included in their welcome basket).

Ye gods. Just writing this stuff makes me feel pathetically excited, even a little competitive. Roll on the bank holiday. Roll on Suffolk. In your homemade chilli jam and damp ziplock bags of specialist salad leaves reside all my hopes for the perfect long weekend.