"Maybe you should," June said gently. "Not because it's guaranteed. Because you've earned the right to make a plan larger than surviving the next week."
The thought stayed with her through May, when the plants began flowering and the garden looked orderly enough to make the previous year's hail damage seem distant. She caught herself imagining a permanent farm stand and small seed business, then quickly returned to the day's chores. The fear was not that she would fail and lose money; she already knew what that felt like. The fear was that she would succeed enough to want something again and then lose it.
June's trial plants performed reasonably well, though the striped line showed more variation under her conditions than Mary Ann had hoped. Mary Ann made a note rather than concealing the result. It was disappointing to have the line's inconsistencies exposed in someone else's garden, but the information mattered precisely because it came from somewhere else. If she wanted to sell seed someday, she needed more than her own favorable experience.
In late June, humid weather settled over the county and did not leave. Rain fell in short afternoon bursts, followed by still evenings that kept the leaves wet well into the night. Mary Ann began finding brown spots on lower foliage. At first she thought the damage resembled a manageable leaf problem she had seen before, but the pattern spread faster than she expected.
She photographed the leaves and sent them to Lena, who arranged to examine samples. The diagnosis involved fungal disease pressure favored by the weather, including early blight on several susceptible plants. Mary Ann had heard about it, but she had never watched a healthy-looking row begin deteriorating at the pace these plants were losing leaves. She felt the old panic rising, that familiar urge to try everything immediately, whether it made sense or not.
Lena stopped her from turning urgency into random action. "First we identify what we're dealing with," she said. "Then you make a management plan. Sanitation, reducing leaf wetness where possible, spacing, monitoring, and whatever treatments are legally appropriate for your crop and conditions. Don't just buy five bottles because the labels promise miracles."
Mary Ann obeyed, mostly. She removed badly affected lower foliage where appropriate, improved airflow, checked the watering schedule, and kept diseased plant debris out of productive beds. She learned that pruning a tomato was not the same as stripping it bare and that reducing foliage thoughtlessly could damage the plant in a different way. Some rows recovered enough to keep producing. Others did not, and she recorded which selected lines tolerated the pressure better without making the mistake of calling them disease-proof.
The hardest lesson was accepting that her best-tasting tomato was not always the best plant to repeat. Dark Shoulder had exquisite flavor, and customers asked for it by description, yet several descendants suffered badly during the humid stretch. One less dramatic red line stayed productive with fewer problems. Mary Ann stood between the rows feeling as though she were betraying the one she loved by assigning more future planting space to the less exciting plant.