"Most good businesses have one. Just don't forget what the first mistake taught you."
She knew he meant the crowded seedlings, the wet soil, and the eagerness to treat quantity as success. The hoop house offered a chance to produce more, but it also created an enclosed space where disease could move quickly if she grew careless. Mary Ann took the warning seriously. She was learning that every improvement carried its own responsibilities.
The seed project advanced more slowly than the commercial harvest. After several generations of selection, the four strongest families began showing increasingly repeatable traits, especially when Mary Ann excluded plants that departed too far from the desired type. She kept detailed records, trialed modest samples in other gardens with permission, and retained backups of promising seed lots. Lena helped her understand which claims were supported by those observations and which would be premature.
The dark line remained the most difficult. It could be delicious beyond anything else in the field, yet some descendants still produced irregular fruit or showed weakness in damp conditions. Mary Ann considered dropping it several times. Each time she reviewed the records, she found reasons to keep a small improvement line alive, but never at the expense of the more reliable crops that paid the bills. It became her reminder that loving a result did not relieve her of the obligation to describe its limitations.
For the seed packets she initially marketed only the lines that had shown enough consistent behavior across repeated growing and trial conditions to justify a plain, accurate description. The packets carried plant characteristics, instructions appropriate to the crop, the year of collection, and the seed lot, as well as cautions where the selection was still relatively new. She avoided using the names of protected commercial varieties as if they were her own, and she checked the applicable rules before offering the packets beyond her state. The paperwork was tedious, but the labels gave customers information she would have wanted when she first opened those cannery seed piles.
She had to choose a name for the seed operation. Evelyn favored something simple with Tovy in it, while June suggested colorful names that sounded like fairy-tale gardens. Daniel Serrano thought the story was important but warned Mary Ann not to let it become the whole sales pitch. The product still needed to be good when the customer opened the packet and planted the seed.
In the end she wrote Tovy Field Selections on the header of a plain order form. Underneath she included four temporary variety descriptions, each more careful than poetic. She printed the first labels herself, cutting them from sheets at the kitchen table and sticking them onto small packets with fingers still faintly stained from sorting seed. When she finished, Gus lay asleep beneath the table and the clock showed nearly midnight.
Mary Ann held one packet in her palm for a long time. It weighed almost nothing. Four years of careful decisions, failures, and observation had become something a stranger might trust enough to put in a garden. She felt more nervous looking at the packet than she had standing behind four crates of tomatoes at her first market, because a customer buying fruit could taste the result immediately. A gardener buying seed was trusting her with part of the following summer.