Mary Ann stared at him. "Do you ever say anything encouraging?"
"I brought you a crate. That's encouragement."
By July, four individual plants stood out enough that she tied wider strips of cloth to their stakes. She had selected them from the lines that had performed best over successive seasons, although she knew that continued planting would still be required to establish dependable seed. One yielded an unusually deep purple-red fruit with firm flesh and a rich, almost earthy flavor. Another produced yellow and red striping that remained striking even when the shape was irregular. A third was a robust red tomato with good acidity, and the fourth made small, dense fruit that held together beautifully in sauce.
She tasted them alone at first, making notes while the cutting board grew stained with juice. Then she took samples to Evelyn and June Palmer, asking each to taste without seeing her own written opinions. Their responses were not identical, which unsettled her until Hollis explained that people did not have to agree about flavor for flavor to be valuable. Evelyn liked the dark tomato best. June preferred the yellow-striped one and said it would make a beautiful summer salad. Hollis chose the firm red fruit because it tasted good and might survive the journey from a farm to a plate.
"And the little paste one?" Mary Ann asked.
"Cook it," he said. "Some tomatoes tell the truth better after heat."
She went home and made two small sauces, one with Little Paste and one with an ordinary supermarket tomato she had bought for comparison. She simmered them separately and tasted them without adding much seasoning. Little Paste produced a dense, fragrant sauce with balanced sweetness and acidity, richer than she expected from fruit she had nearly discarded the previous year. She set a spoon on the counter and laughed, delighted and slightly offended that Hollis had been right again.
The first real harvest arrived in August. Not large enough to call commercial, but far larger than the scattered baskets of earlier years. Mary Ann picked carefully in the cooler morning hours, set the fruit shoulder-down in shallow crates, and avoided piling the delicate varieties on top of one another. By the weekend she had four crates of tomatoes she was genuinely willing to sell to strangers. It did not sound like much, but she had spent almost three years learning how to produce those four crates.
She asked Evelyn about a place at the Saturday market. Evelyn sent her to the market coordinator, who explained the stall fee, local requirements, and the need to bring her own table. Mary Ann borrowed a folding table from the church, carried a clean cloth from the linen cupboard, and made handwritten cards describing the four groups as trial selections rather than registered, stable varieties. She deliberately avoided promising that they would grow true from saved seed. The distinction mattered to her even if most customers would never ask.