If there is one thing people want to know more than any other, it is when I am going to do a column about gardening.

“I have been just about going crazy for some rib-tickling tales of watering something” might be your justifiable concern.

I have a doozy about a radish, but I’m saving it for my acceptance speech when I win the PEN/Faulkner. Fear not, though. It has often been said that even a mediocre story about gardening makes everything that Marcel Proust wrote look like a turd. With that in mind, I give you this fairly solid number about a certain potato of my acquaintance. We’ll call our potato “Carl.”