"You going to call them?" he asked.
"No."
"You sure?"
"If the field works, the article won't matter. If it doesn't, arguing with the article won't fix it."
Benjamin looked toward Clara's cabinets.
"That sounds like her."
Cole shook his head. "She would've written them a three-page letter with citations."
"Fair point."
April became a month of waiting and measuring.
Cole checked soil temperature every morning. He monitored the incorporated zones for overheating, because fresh high-moisture organic material could create oxygen-starved pockets if concentrated too heavily. Where temperatures rose too quickly, he aerated with shallow cultivation. Where the surface crusted, he broke it carefully without turning the entire profile again.
He also learned that the field would not obey his notebook.
The northwest block, which had received the most pomace, developed a greasy anaerobic smell after a heavy rain. Cole had to open the surface and mix in additional straw. One low corner stayed too wet and was removed from the planting area. The comparison block infiltrated water so slowly that a half-inch shower left puddles for most of a day.
The first follow-up laboratory results came back in early May.
They were encouraging, but nowhere near the miracle Arthur's later telling would claim.
Average surface pH had moved from roughly 8.3 to between 7.7 and 8.0 depending on the block. That was a meaningful shift in the amended zone, not a magical conversion to perfect garden soil. Electrical conductivity remained within a range Cole considered manageable. Organic matter had risen measurably in the upper layer. More important to him, wet aggregate stability improved in the sections that had received straw and pomace together.
He carried the lab sheet to Clara's grave that evening.
The cemetery sat behind a small Methodist church outside town. Cole did not speak aloud at first. He sat in the grass beside the headstone and read the numbers again.
"You were right about the straw," he finally said.
A mockingbird called from the fence.
"You were also right that I used too much in Block One."
He folded the paper.
"You'd probably enjoy that part more."
The field began greening after the middle of May.
At first it was impossible to distinguish tomato volunteers from weeds. Pigweed emerged. Lambsquarters appeared along the edges. Foxtail grass pushed through the eastern comparison block. Cole walked the rows on his knees, comparing cotyledons and first true leaves to seedling photographs in Clara's horticulture books.
Then came three warm days and a spring rain.
On May 21, green seedlings appeared by the thousands.
Not a perfect carpet. Not a uniform army. Real biology did not arrive in straight lines simply because a story later needed it to. Emergence was thickest where the cold-process pomace had been distributed most evenly.
Some sections were crowded with hundreds of seedlings per square yard. Others were sparse. A few areas produced almost nothing.
But enough emerged to make cars slow on County Road 7.
Cole stood at the gate before sunrise the next morning, staring.
The tomato seedlings had a particular green, deeper than many of the weeds, and their serrated first leaves caught the angled light. He walked into the field, crouched, and touched one gently with the back of his finger.
He thought of Clara's note: Do not assume waste is biologically empty.
For the first time since the trucks arrived, he let himself believe the experiment might become more than soil rehabilitation.
That belief lasted until nine o'clock.
Then Teresa Nolan drove up.
"You have a problem," she said.
Cole looked across the field. "Which one?"
"The township trustee thinks you're intentionally propagating an unregistered crop from industrial residual."
"Is that illegal?"
"Not automatically. But the county attorney wants to know whether the seed is controlled material, whether the cannery contract permits commercial use, and whether you've created a volunteer weed issue you're going to spread into the ditch."
Cole sighed.