Not fixed.
Not transformed.
Beginning to be different than it was.
She pulled her hand out of the soil and looked at the dark mark it left on her palm.
She wrote in the notebook:
"August 24. Plants in the upper section showing canopy closure.
"Lower sections sparse but holding.
"Soil at root depth in the amended rows beginning to show early structural change. Darker color, slight crumble in the surface layer.
"This is slow.
"This is supposed to be slow.
"The question is whether it's enough."
She capped the pen.
She looked at what she'd written.
Then she added one line below it.
"Dig the first test row in three weeks."
The spading fork went into the clay on a Thursday morning in the second week of September.
Ren drove it in carefully, angling the tines away from where she estimated the tubers would be sitting, working by feel and memory of how deep she'd planted rather than by what she could see.
The first plant came up clean.
She set the fork aside, knelt, and used her hands for the rest, pulling the clay back from the root zone the way you'd open something you weren't sure about, prepared for either outcome.
What she found was not enormous.
The tubers were not the size of a man's fist.
Not the kind of yield that would photograph well or make anyone in the county revise their opinion on first glance.
They were real.
Firm.
Clean skin.
Three to five tubers per plant.
On the first one, she checked the skin.
Intact.
No soft spots.
No evidence of the rot that had taken 3,000 of their predecessors in April.
She picked one up and pressed her thumbnail into the surface.
The flesh beneath was white and dense and smelled like soil rather than like defeat.
She checked four more plants in the same upper section before she let herself write anything down.
The count held.
Three to five tubers per plant, consistent across the five test hills.
The size range was what you'd expect from first-year soil improvement on ground that had never grown anything successfully.
Not large, but legitimate.
She moved to the lower section and checked three plants there.