One afternoon she carried the dead seedlings to a compost area away from the new planting ground and stood there longer than she intended. She knew farming well enough to recognize an ordinary setback. She had seen newborn calves die despite good care and crops fail after months of work. But the smallness of this particular failure hurt her unexpectedly, perhaps because she had allowed herself to imagine that the garden would be easier than everything else she had lost.
That night she wrote in the notebook: Too many seeds together. Stems fail at soil line. Less moisture and more space next time. Beneath the notes, after a pause, she added: No reason to quit after one try.
The second attempt started with a smaller section and seed she had washed enough to separate from the worst of the pulp. Mary Ann set out markers at wider intervals and used small trays on a shelf in the old mudroom. Her kitchen became a place of damp newspapers, labeled cups, and penciled dates. She moved the seedlings into brighter light whenever the weather allowed, carried them back inside when nights grew cold, and inspected their stems with an attention that would have seemed excessive to anyone who did not know how much she needed them to live.
She lost fewer that time. Their leaves developed a sturdier color, and some grew thick enough to transplant into the field. A late cold snap damaged a dozen anyway. Two plants disappeared under the determined attention of a ground squirrel, and a third wilted because the drip line she had improvised from old garden hose clogged at the wrong moment.
When the survivors finally flowered, Mary Ann discovered that she had planted an argument rather than a crop. Some plants rose taller than her shoulders and produced few flowers. Others stayed compact but carried clusters so heavy their weak stems folded under the weight. A few produced tomatoes shaped like small barrels, while others bore narrow fruit with thick skins and flavor so bland she could barely justify adding them to soup.
She carried a bucketful of the first fruit into the kitchen and cut them across their middles. The flesh inside varied from pale, mealy red to a dense scarlet with almost no visible seed pockets. She tasted one, made a face, and pushed the cutting board away. It had the firm, convenient texture a processing factory might value, but none of the sweetness or complexity she remembered from her grandfather's garden.
"Well," she told Gus, who was hoping something edible would fall, "nobody's going to line up for that."
There was still something about the experiment that held her. Even among plants grown from the same heaps of waste, the differences were remarkable. One fruit tasted better after an extra day on the counter, and another developed a sharp, pleasing flavor despite its odd appearance. Mary Ann began putting small colored strings around the stakes of plants she wanted to find again. She was not sure whether she was selecting anything meaningful, but the act of choosing felt better than treating the entire field as one large success or one large failure.