The drainage channels ran between rows at angles that caught the late light.
She wrote in her notebook before she went inside.
"8,000 pieces in the ground.
"Higher ridges. Drainage cut. Straw down. Compost at the root zone.
"Everything I know how to do differently.
"Now we wait."
May moved into June.
The rain came and went in the measured way of late spring rather than the sustained way of early spring.
The drainage channels did what she designed them to do.
Ren checked the field every morning, digging test holes in rotating locations across the planted area, tracking what the soil was doing at root depth.
The clay was still clay.
The change she was working toward wasn't visible yet in the soil structure.
That would take seasons, not weeks.
What was visible by the end of the fourth week after the second planting was the first consistent emergence of green along the ridges.
Not scattered survivors this time.
Actual rows.
Sparse in the lowest sections, where the drainage was still fighting the clay's natural tendency, stronger on the higher ground where the amended soil had given the roots something to push through.
She stood at the edge of the field on the morning the rows became undeniable and looked at the color they made against the gray of the surrounding ridges.
Ridgeback Field had green in it.
Real green.
Planted green.
The kind that meant something was alive in the ground and working toward more.
She didn't say anything out loud.
She wrote a single line in the notebook.
"First real rows visible. This is a crop now, not an accident."
The Colorado potato beetles arrived in the second week of June.
They arrived every June across every potato planting in Harland County, but the pressure on Ridgeback was heavier than Ren had expected.
The field had been fallow for years.
The beetle population in the surrounding soil and hedge had no recent memory of being managed.
They found the new green rows quickly.
She found the first egg cluster on a Tuesday morning, a neat orange mass on the underside of a leaf, the eggs already past the earliest stage and close to hatching.
She found three more clusters before she'd walked the first two rows completely.
The commercial treatment most growers used was not in her budget across six acres.
She thought about the chickens.
It was a legitimate strategy, rotating a portable enclosure through the infested rows, letting the birds clean up beetles and larvae before moving them along to the next section.
She'd read about it in one of Earl's extension-service pamphlets, a stack of which still sat on the shelf below the journals.
Her first attempt wasn't calibrated well.
Too many birds in too small a section, left too long because she was managing three other tasks simultaneously and didn't get back to move the enclosure on schedule.