Potatoes and Porcupines

Attempts to persuade the men to plant some potatoes are failing. The arrangement is that they run the kitchen garden and we can take anything the household requires. The only discussion is about what should be grown. They want tomato crops in near industrial quantities, leafy green vegetables, lettuces, courgettes, peppers, aubergines, and beans of various shapes and sizes. So do I, but I want potatoes too.

Plumbers couldn't suck their teeth more menacingly over a frozen boiler dripping icicles than the men over the problems and costs of growing potatoes. The soil is wrong - too thin, (thin? soil?); the garden is at the wrong height (above sea level?), it is unprotected (from what?). Unprotected, they tell me, leaning on the enclosing fences that stretch for acres, from porcupines.

I can see it in my mind's eye: dawn, the porcupines in family groups, spines quivering in the early morning air, making their way from drinking in the stream, to feast on the potato patch as we watch, guests rousted from their beds at the crack-of the better to fully appreciate rustic scenes of past time. Oh yes. Nearly as good as watching the sun rise, (another, by definition, dawn activity), and sitting in the pitch dark being bitten by insects listening to tales we have loved and going ooooh at the stars.

Plant potatoes, and don't fence them, I insist. Life must be lived to the full.