"You want separate tags and counts for every affected row?" she asked.
"For the comparisons Elena marked, yes."
"Then give me two extra rolls of labels and keep the bin trailer where I can reach it."
I did. Teresa made it happen with less conversation than the rest of us would have required to plan it.
For the first two days, the results were encouraging. The mature trees had endured the shortage with less damage than I had feared. Some fruit ran smaller, but the overall quality remained close to our historical range. I allowed myself a modest sense of relief, which lasted until we moved into the young block.
Block Five had always been our future. The trees were three years old, too young to carry the full crop of mature plantings but old enough that we had begun counting on them to grow into profitable production. My father had taught me never to burden young trees with more fruit than they could support. We had thinned those rows carefully in spring, expecting a manageable crop and steady root development.
The water shortage changed that balance. Several rows had produced fruit smaller than the comparison rows even after irrigation recovered. The leaves looked better by harvest, but the fruit sizing had not caught up. Teresa held a peach in one hand and compared it with another from a control row.
"Same day picked," she said. "Same variety. Different story."
At the packing house, the difference became measurable. Our packing partner, Valley Crest Produce, separated fresh-market grades from processing fruit and recorded quantities by block. The fresh-market peaches received the prices on which our budget depended. Processing peaches still had value, but not nearly the same value. A grower does not lose everything when a peach is too small for a grocery shelf. He loses the difference between what the peach could reasonably have sold for and what it actually brings.
The packing manager, Fiona Mercer, walked me through the reports. She had no interest in the HOA dispute and made that clear before we sat down.
"I'm not going to write a letter saying your crop was perfect before this happened," she told me. "I can't know that. What I can give you is the exact packout, the grades, the invoices, and your historical block comparisons. Elena can interpret the horticulture. We can explain what the fruit actually sold for."
"That's what I need."
She slid a report across the table. The affected rows had produced a higher processing percentage and a lower average fresh-market return than the comparable rows. The difference did not destroy the harvest. It did reduce revenue enough to matter. I remembered Denise standing beside the lake explaining that the shoreline needed to look presentable for the home tour, and I wondered if she had ever seen a packing sheet where a small shift in grade erased weeks of careful work.
I did not spend much time wondering. There were trucks to load and buyers to call.