Yamtastic.

There are a thousand and one practical uses for them, Mitch. You can eat them, for one thing. And if you wire them up right, you can use them as primitive dry cell batteries. That’s two. Just nine hundred ninety-nine to go.

Damn, it’s hard to talk a man of mad science into something that doesn’t involve explosions. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are currently in the midst of an agrarian revolution. We’re feeling our roots here in rural upstate New York. Why fight it, Big Green? You are people of the land. You are born of the soil, and you refer to yourselves in the second person. Did I ever tell you my daddy was a poor dirt farmer from up in the hills around Milford? Well, if I did, I was either drunk or more drunk. Dad grew some tomatoes and hot peppers in the backyard, that’s about it. (Oh, and there were those grape vines, but I digress.)

Okay, so we DON’T have the soil in our blood. What of it? We are simply living up to the promise implicit in our name. If we call ourselves Big Green, we should be cultivating green things in a big way. And now, with the advent of robot-driven agriculture, we can, in a sense, plant our cake and eat it too. Though I understand that cake is very hard to grow hydroponically. It takes a lot of sun, and when it ripens, you have to frost the whole crop or your yield goes right through the floor. I’ve seen many a good man flounder on the shoals of cake farming, my friend. Nope …. not for me.


No, we’ve decided to go with sweet potatoes. That’s not entirely by accident (though most of what we do is). Our long time associate, the mansized tuber, is himself an overgrown sweet potato, and he has graciously consented to contribute some shoots to the cause. I’ve instructed Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to plant the shoots in such a manner as might be recommended by people who know how the hell to do this. Marvin duly checked YouTube, then started poking shoots into little pots, all lined up on tables in the dilapidated main assembly room. Before any of us knew it, he was raising a small army of mansized tubers …. only they weren’t yet man-sized, unless we’re talking about very tiny men. They were more mouse-sized. Give them a chance!

I don’t know where this is going, but I know this: our friendly mansized tuber is going to have a lot of company this spring.