Cole loaded baling twine into his cart.
"Mostly."
"You planting anything?"
"Already did."
Arthur stared.
"What?"
Cole smiled slightly.
Arthur laughed again.
"You really are waiting for tomato seeds out of factory sludge."
"Some."
"Son, farming isn't fairy tales."
"No."
Arthur slapped him once on the shoulder.
"Call me when the magic beans come up."
On May 18, nothing obvious had happened.
The field looked dark.
Strange.
Uneven.
But healthier than it had in years.
Cole worried.
Three days later, warm rain crossed Knox County.
It fell gently rather than violently.
Almost twenty-four hours of intermittent moisture.
On the morning of May 21, Cole drove to the parcel before sunrise.
At first he thought the field had developed a green haze.
He parked.
Walked closer.
Seedlings.
Thousands.
Then tens of thousands.
Tomato cotyledons had pushed through the surface across broad sections of the field.
Cole crouched.
His hands began shaking.
He moved twenty feet.
More.
Another row.
More.
Not every section had germinated equally.
But enough had emerged that the field appeared carpeted.
He laughed aloud.
There was nobody there to hear him.
For nearly an hour, Cole walked through the five acres.
He did not celebrate long.
The emergence created another problem.
Too many plants.
If he left them at that density, competition would destroy most of them.
Cole had planned for that possibility.
He spent the next two weeks thinning aggressively.
He selected the strongest seedlings.
Moved others.
Created rows.
Removed weak clusters.
Marked plants by apparent fruit characteristics only later as varieties became identifiable.
Raymond helped.
So did two college friends.
The local newspaper returned.
The same photographer who had documented the "tomato landfill" stood at the road staring at five acres of green.
"You planted all these?"
Cole shook his head.
"Not exactly."
The reporter walked into the field.
"These came from the waste?"
"Most of them."
The Friday headline was more cautious.
TOMATO LANDFILL TURNS GREEN
Arthur Vance read it at breakfast.
He drove past that afternoon.
He did not stop.
By early June, the field had become a genuine crop.
The pH in representative areas had shifted dramatically from the original 8.4 measurements, with much of the root zone testing close to 6.5.
The soil was darker.
Its texture had changed.
Not permanently transformed after one application, but undeniably improved.
Cole could push a shovel into areas that previously required his full weight.
Roots penetrated deeper.
Moisture remained longer after rain.
The biological activity fascinated him most.
Fungal threads.
Earthworms.
Decomposing straw.
Beetles.
A smell closer to living soil than dead mineral clay.
Clara had always written that soil restoration rarely announced itself dramatically.
Most of the important work happened where nobody could see it.
Cole thought of her every morning.
He kept one of her notebooks in the tractor toolbox.
The summer of 1992 did not become easy simply because Cole's experiment worked.