The next week she cleared the ground and repaired part of the irrigation line. Spring work was more demanding than the previous year's small plots, and her knee complained after every long day. She learned to alternate standing jobs with seated seed work and to stop before pain made her careless. She also asked a teenager who helped at the feed store, Owen Bell, to assist with some of the heavier lifting on weekends. She paid him for the work rather than accepting his polite offer to help for free.
"You don't have to pay me that much," Owen said when she handed him the first envelope.
"You did the work. You earned it."
He looked around at the newly prepared ground. "You going to fill all of this with tomatoes?"
"That's the plan."
"How many?"
Mary Ann sighed. "More than I've ever grown, fewer than I'm beginning to fear."
By May the quarter acre looked like a real planting instead of a backyard experiment. Rows of small transplants stood under supports that Mary Ann had assembled from used materials and new supplies chosen carefully enough to last. She continued selecting seed from individual plants within the promising lines, but also planted reliable purchased varieties to ensure that some of the harvest would meet customer expectations. It was a practical compromise, one she might have dismissed a year earlier as abandoning the original experiment. Now she recognized that dependable income could support the riskier selection work rather than competing with it.
Hollis approved when he visited, although he complained that she had planted one row too close to a patch of trees. He pointed out how the afternoon shade might change fruit ripening and make comparisons less useful. Mary Ann argued that the difference would be minor, and he made her stand at the end of the row and look at the shadows. She finally moved several plants, grumbling throughout the work.
"You know," she told him, "it would be cheaper to hire somebody who only told me things I wanted to hear."
"Sure would," he agreed. "The fruit would cost you more afterward."
She began keeping a separate business ledger in addition to the plant notebook. Expenses went on one side, sales on the other, and hours of labor in a third column so she could no longer pretend her own time was free. The first totals were sobering. Even if she sold every tomato the quarter acre produced, she would need to manage waste, packaging, transportation, and market fees to make the venture worthwhile.
The first serious problem arrived disguised as good weather. Warm days helped the transplants take hold, and early growth was vigorous. Mary Ann admired the green rows and began imagining market tables heavy with colored fruit. Then a weather warning appeared on the radio one June afternoon, mentioning unstable air and the possibility of severe thunderstorms moving across the county.