It seems some do, though they're not prepared to pay very much. My friendly greengrocer took four kilograms for £6. Flushed with success I set up a stall in my dad's farmyard with bags of tomatoes and cardboard placards shouting ‘Sungold: deliciously sweet, £1 per bag' and ‘Gardener's Delight: classic full-flavoured cherry' in cheery market trader fashion. I added an old biscuit tin with a slit in the top for money, wrote ‘Tomato Tin' on it and stuck a picture of a truss of tomatoes on the side that I'd done on my computer, in colour and everything. It's like Blue Peter, but with a hard commercial edge.

So far I've had £2 so am, of course, deliriously excited. Let's hope business continues at this dizzying level. I'm also thrilled because it gives me an outlet to offload some of the aubergines which have been haunting me for several weeks. People complain about the prolific nature of courgettes – the way that you go away for a long weekend to Padstow and come back to find a marrow has grown through your greenhouse and taken over your neighbour's swimming pool. People even write humorously titled books, such as ‘What Will I Do With all Those Courgettes?', the front cover of which features a drawing of a man hilariously overwhelmed by a pile of courgettes (not quite as intriguing as the similarly self-published ‘Liquid Gold: the Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants', about which the less said the better). But aubergines are supposed to be really hard to grow. When the books do a difficulty rating, they come up almost as high as cauliflowers (to be attempted only by trained brassica professionals). My aubergines, however, won't stop coming. It's a purple tide: clusters of mini ones for stir fries, bell-shaped ones, enormous pinky-white ones like you get in French markets. This would be lovely were it not for the fact that I've now realised I don't really like aubergines. More importantly, neither does anyone in my household or extended family.

So let's hope the great British public will buy my aubergines and put their £1 in the biscuit tin (and not a 2p piece or a paper clip – I'm watching you…). God knows, I'll need it. On the way to the garden I stopped off for a takeaway ham and cheese toasted sandwich in a café with big leather sofas and Italian biscuits in paper wrappers just four doors up from the friendly greengrocer who had paid me £6 for the tomatoes. The cost of the sandwich? £5.60. I ate it with tears in my eyes.