Honesty boxes
Mike Buckley’s vegetable patch is full to bursting. Garlic, rock melons, lettuce, chillies, capsicums, broccoli, snow peas, zucchinis, globe artichokes, microgreens, tomatoes, asparagus, and more besides. You name it, it’s pretty much all there.
That may not always be the case, as he builds experience and refines the process, focusing on the doers. It seems a sure bet, however, that the organic flower and vegetable garden, which he started in 2020, will keep getting bigger.
It also seems a sure bet the ducks and chooks will remain, along with the beehive. All of this produce needs an outlet, and he and his family have a well stocked fridge and freezer, but he also sells at market and from a colourful roadside honesty-box stall.
The traffic along River Rd between Ngā ruawā hia and Hamilton is constant on a Monday morning, whipping past on the other side of a feijoa hedge Buckley has planted. There are also established fruit trees, though only one pine nut tree survives of several they planted when they shifted to the one-acre section 10 years ago; they have discovered the trees don’t handle the wind and are prone to splitting. And the wiltshire and dorper sheep they ran in the early days are also gone, with the focus now on vegetables and, increasingly, flowers including zinnia, gladioli and marigold.
Today, the honesty box at the gate has zucchinis, tomato seedlings and flowers. Snowpeas and further zucchinis are kept in a fridge inside the property, but drivers can, as the sign says, toot their horn if they want some. They can also toot for honey or eggs.
Or they can just count out their change, pay in the honesty box, and leave with a bunch of sunflowers at $1 each, a courgette for $1 or tomato seedling for $3. Buckley is relaxed about the takings, which he says amounted to about $15 for a fortnight the last time he cleared the box.
‘‘I have regulars and that’s what I concentrate on. So people who constantly come for duck eggs or chicken eggs, and they frequently say ‘what else have you got today?’’’
He often says to people if they don’t have cash on them, just to pop it in the honesty box next time they’re passing.
The amount of theft is minuscule. ‘‘Occasionally people take things without paying us. I figure if they’re that hard up that they need to feed their family, they must have needed it.’’
One person, confounded by a lack of coins, left a laundry token.
‘‘You’ve got to remember, eh, 99.9 per cent of people are good honest people who just are doing the best they can.’’
He knows some Americans who are blown away by the honesty box system. There’s no way it would work in the US, they say – the money would be stolen and the chances are the stall would be kicked over and set on fire.
In New Zealand, however, the honesty box is still going strong, an enduring and endearing feature of a drive along our rural roads.
You need a decent shoulder of road or perhaps a piece of driveway, a sign, preferably eyecatching, and a strongly built, secured box with a slot for coins and notes. You may also, given the times, post a bank account number for those who don’t carry cash. And if you’re really onto it, you might use the My Honesty Box app, operated by QR code.
Whichever way it’s done, noone’s getting rich out of a roadside honesty box. Buckley is happy if he covers the cost of his seeds.
Across country in Eureka, Tracey Leen, who is developing a strikingly similar vegetable plot, uses the proceeds to feed an array of animals she and her husband keep. She runs through a list that includes about 40 chickens, a dog, a cat, two turtles, budgies, a pheasant. ‘‘Anything that’s homeless, we take it in. We’ve got to feed them somehow.’’
She grows enough to help feed friends and family, and sells the leftovers at the gate.
Leen was laid off in 2019 from a fast-paced job she loved, but which involved a daily commute to Auckland, and was wondering what to do with herself. ‘‘My mother said, ‘Tracey, get your hands in the dirt’. So I got them in the dirt, but I couldn’t get them out.’’
Now she is, as she says, grounded, with an ever expanding vegetable patch that, the day Stuff visits, sees her roadside stall stocked with strawberries at $5 a punnet, free-range eggs, $5 a dozen, and flowers, $5 a bunch.
She built all this from scratch, with no background in gardening. ‘‘One woman, one spade, one wheelbarrow,’’ she says.
The Hamilton-Morrinsville traffic roars by as Leen shares her joy in gardening.
‘‘It’s a hobby as such but it’s lovely to grow the produce and to be able to share that little bit more. It’s a great way to just share really good produce with no sprays, no nasties,’’ she says.
‘‘Especially after Covid, one thing we learned was health is the biggest wealth.’’
Brittany Morison, of Tomtit Farm, a small Matangi market garden, adds tunnel houses to the grower’s arsenal, and her honesty box is a more polished affair under cover alongside the Front Paddock Cafe in Matangi. Her fridge there has cucumbers, large salad bags at $10 a bag, honey and cabbage. Not so much kale after she found a lot of her customers weren’t keen on the green. Morison built on her nutritionist background to establish Tomtit Farm on Webster Rd with James Stembridge. They started in 2018 and in September last year Morison went fulltime on the project. Tomtit is a well-honed operation, based on customers signing up for weekly subscription vegetable boxes which Morison delivers to Cambridge, Te Awamutu and Hamilton.
The honesty box stall is a good adjunct, providing a place for overflow. Morison says they make between $200 and $400 a month from the stall. She restocks two or three times a week, depending on the season, and summer will see more flowers added to the mix.
Tomtit also uses the My Honesty Box app. Customers who download the app can scan the QR code, which provides them with a list of what’s on sale; they can select as many of each as they want, with the app giving them a running tally of how much they’re spending, and then pay by internet banking or put it on their credit card. Morison can keep an eye on what’s selling when, making restocking more efficient.
Honesty boxes are, she says, part of Kiwi culture. ‘‘Whenever I’m driving anywhere, I’ll always stop for an honesty box,’’ she says. ‘‘I just love buying on the side of the road.’’
She pays tribute to Kaitake Farm, which she and Stembridge visited when they were starting up and which was the catalyst for the My Honesty Box app. Kaitake is based on family land south of New Plymouth. Co-owner Toby Dixon says their half acre, all worked by hand following organic principles, sustains two co-owners, two almost fulltime workers and one part time, albeit at little more than minimum wage rates.
Kaitake were selling up to 40 zucchinis a day in the leadup to Christmas and the same number of cucumbers and cherry tomato punnets, while the ‘‘bread and butter’’ is the bagged greens. To get their start, they teamed up with Beach Road Milk Co, which had already built a shop to sell its raw milk via dispensers into customers’ containers. The Beach Road Milk Co store now also stocks honey and bread as well as Kaitake’s vegetables, all on an honesty box basis, apart from the milk.
It was a customer who came up with the idea for the app and who then developed it for free. Frustrated by the clunky payment system, he designed the app ‘‘as a gift to the world’’, Dixon says.
Dixon says Kaitake also sells at two retail outlets, but the honesty box store accounts for the overwhelming majority of sales. Nearby Oakura, population 2000, includes a good number of commuters to New Plymouth who pass near the store. There is a bit of a 5 o’clock rush as commuters return home, and also a 3 o’clock
‘‘As long as I’m paying for my flowers, still making a bit of a profit, I’d rather see people happy and being able to afford to get some flowers.’’
Pirongia florist Melissa Campbell
rush from school mums, Dixon says. He says they are focusing on getting more yield from the space they’ve got, rather than extending their footprint. It’s doable, he says, because of the wonders of soil. ‘‘What’s going on under there, it’s just beyond comprehension.’’
Soil is also something of an obsession for Newstead man Tre Tischler, whose streetside stall on Morrinsville Rd offers lilies and tomato plants, but also biochar, charcoal, compost, mulch and firewood.
Tischler has 12 acres of land, which he describes as a smallscale organic farm.The stall has been running for 20 years, he estimates, after his kids started selling lilies and excess fruit.
‘‘And then I started trying to do something with the block of land here, so I make compost and biochar and charcoal, organic products out of the decay cycle of trees.’’
He will bring in a load of trees for stock fodder, converting leaves into manure, and then making compost and biochar from what’s left.
The biochar both sequesters carbon and improves soil, helping with drainage, keeping soil aerobic and providing a home for micro-organisms, he says, removing the need for fertiliser – and playing a role in combating climate change.
‘‘The benefits of using it as a soil amendment are outstanding.’’
The stall helps keep him involved in the community, he says, while the gate sales help pay for the cost of living, particularly rates. Sadly, however, he and Shona Purdie, who also works on the property, say they have recently had to install cameras to monitor activity at the roadside stall – Tischler points out there are days when the stall runs at a loss because of thefts.
Nearby lily sellers Owen and Carol Baker also find thefts from their Matangi Rd stall frustrating. It’s not enough for the retired farmers to have second thoughts about their hobby, but they have seen one man pull in and swipe four bunches of lilies, while another who took three bunches made a big show of putting ‘‘money’’ in the box which turned out to be folded-up cardboard. They have also heard of other thefts from stalls around the area.
Their stall started four or five years ago with daffodils, which flourish on the borders of their section. ‘‘We thought, oh well, we’ll put them out the gate and see what happens,’’ Owen Baker says. The daffodils proved popular, as are the lilies which they started selling three years ago, and he says they have regulars among those who stop. ‘‘If we’re out there, quite a lot of them like just to stop and chat.’’
Evidently, enough people still carry cash. Baker says the daffodils sell for $2 a bunch, and they top up during the day as needed. ‘‘Sometimes you’ll go out there and there’ll be about $10 in 10 cent pieces and 20 cent pieces,’’ he laughs.
Some of the proceeds from those sales are set to go towards helping cystic fibrosis sufferers, a cause the couple supports.
Flowers tend to be a feature of roadside stalls, and Pirongia florist Melissa Campbell has taken the honesty box a step further, with a stand inside the township’s Cafe on Franklin featuring beautiful arrangements of cut flowers. She grows some herself, like the alstroemeria, and buys some from Hamilton Flower Market, typically restocking on Tuesdays and Fridays. She lives nearby, so can easily pop in if a customer wants a particular order.
She says locals know they can pay directly to her bank account, with the number included on the stand. ‘‘They’ll just come grab some flowers. And then when they get home they’ll transfer the money. Or if they forget, the next day, they’ll message me and apologise: ‘Oh, I’ve done it now!’’’
Pricing is competitive, she says. ‘‘As long as I’m paying for my flowers, still making a bit of a profit, I’d rather see people happy and being able to afford to get some flowers.’’
The drive from Pirongia to Te Awamutu reveals another roadside offering, this time of lilies, while on entering Te Awamutu an honesty box stands empty, no doubt waiting for another season. Northeast of Hamilton, at Puketaha, a stall promoting tomato seedlings is similarly empty; the occupants didn’t get on to things early enough this year.
But most stalls are stocked, and that includes the ubiquitous horse manure bags stacked roadside with, typically, a $2 pricetag per bag. One such stall off Kaipaki Rd stands out for its catchy sign: ‘‘Horse butt pellets: gluten free, dairy free, top quality.’’
These ones are sold at a slight premium, $3 a bag, but that is down from the original $4 a bag, says budding entrepreneur Lachie Peters, 12. He started the venture just under a year ago, with plenty of the raw product around the horse-loving family’s property along nearby Pukerimu Lane.
Lachie scoops the stuff up from the paddock, shovelling it into a bag. In 15 minutes he can get five bags ready, and then dad’s truck is used to transport it along the lane to the corner with Kaipaki Rd.
He’s learned along the way; for instance, the jar they initially used was replaced with a solid box chained to the post after the jar was being emptied out by passersby.
The amount needed changes with the seasons. ‘‘Lately we’ve been selling quite a lot because people are planting tomatoes and all sorts like that.’’
His biggest score was $50 when a neighbour planting a hedge took the lot one day. Other than that, it builds up.
‘‘The other day I went into a bike shop and I had this massive Tupperware container of coins and he just looked at me like, ‘What are you doing?’’’
He had to explain he was running a business that dealt only in cash. The $200 worth of coins in the Tupperware container was just right to buy a helmet with.
There’s a strong element of the good life around those running roadside stalls. Dixon had a reason for leaving his well-paid job as a surveyor to take on Kaitake Farm. ‘‘I wanted to do something a bit more meaningful and a bit more exciting and bring value into the world,’’ he says.
Morison similarly was looking for something more meaningful when she started up Tomtit farm. For Buckley, it was partly about escaping the city, while for Leen the change was enforced but welcome.
And it’s also about community. ‘‘It’s creating a community, it’s keeping you involved in the community, isn’t it?’’ Tischler says. Neighbours bring him prunings for him to compost and return, potentially as biochar. ‘‘So you’ve got a sense of involvement in the community,’’ he says. ‘‘I’ve got to know and meet lots and lots of neighbours for that reason, and they’ve got to know me and you’ve got this relationship going that works for the community.’’
Leen similarly says running her vege garden and roadside stall is a great way to meet people. She has regulars, particularly older people, who like to stop for a chat when calling in for half a dozen eggs. ‘‘It’s a great way to stay connected with the community. You do feel like you’re giving a little bit even though you’re charging.’’
It’s a sustainable way to live, she says. ‘‘You’re not going to make millions. But you’re going to probably feed your soul.’’