Johnny is Planting Potatoes or Is He?
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This is the first short story of a collection of anecdotes about life in the countryside. The main character, Johnny, is a selfish, inept, middle-aged man with big dreams, big ego and a huge desire to get things done using other people's free labour. In this comic account, Johnny is trying himself as an agronomist having no experience nor any knowledge pertinent to planting potatoes or anything else for that matter.
Johnny approached the potato-planting business seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he even went out and bought a book. Only the book was not about planting potatoes or any other vegetable for that matter. It was about building and managing a house with a garden on a plot of land on a part-time basis. The book said nothing about planting potatoes, only a little about planting flowers, which Johnny considered "a wasteful habit as flowers cannot be eaten".