Eli liked that answer. He had been troubled by the idea that the family's only hope required copying an old man's handwriting without understanding why the instructions existed. He wanted to know why clover mattered, why the compost had to be mature, and why Callie kept smelling the soil before she decided whether it was ready. Once the questions began, he asked so many that Dutch informed him the farm would soon need a full-time person just to answer Eli Walker's questions, then corrected himself because the boy was a Voss and everybody in the yard knew it.
The first task was to protect the surviving plants from the early trial. Those plants could still contribute to the seed increase if they developed normally, but Marianne wanted their history recorded separately. Callie erected a simple windbreak, checked the irrigation line, and stopped handling the leaves every morning merely to reassure herself they were alive. Eli took photographs from fixed positions instead, so differences over time would be visible without disturbing the plants.
The second task was to prepare the new plot without hurrying. Dutch helped spread compost from a pile the farm had been turning for months, working it into the surface carefully rather than burying it in an enormous trench. Callie tested several locations with a spade, feeling for soil that broke into crumbs instead of forming hard wet clods. She chose a corner where the clover cover had left the ground better protected and marked a modest area with stakes and string.
For the new planting, they used only those kernels that had passed the most promising viability checks, handling each one with a care that would have seemed absurd to somebody accustomed to loading bulk seed by the sack. Callie recorded the lot number and position before the kernel went into the soil. She also planted comparison rows with a suitable commercial variety under the same local care, not because she expected a simple contest to prove everything, but because even an imperfect reference was better than relying on memory.
Arthur helped them arrange the timing and isolation measures that the small planting required. He explained that a seed increase for an open-pollinated variety could be compromised if pollen from nearby corn reached it during the wrong period. The problem mattered especially because so little original seed remained. They set aside the portion intended for preserving the line and treated the adjacent commercial planting as a comparison rather than a source of future Voss Flint seed.
The corrected work took days that Callie could hardly spare. When she left before dawn for her outside maintenance job, Dutch checked the soil condition but did not alter anything without entering it in the notebook. Eli watered only according to the agreed measurements instead of giving the rare plants extra because he liked them. Callie returned after sunset, washed the dirt from her hands, and compared the day's notes to the previous entries before allowing herself to be hopeful.