Two to three tubers per plant.
Smaller, the yield reflecting soil that had received less amendment, less drainage correction, less of everything she'd concentrated on the higher ground.
Still real.
Still a crop.
She sat back on her heels at the edge of the lower section and looked across the six acres.
She wrote in the notebook:
"Best section, nearly four times what I would have projected from this ground based on Earl's old records.
"Lower sections smaller but usable.
"The difference between the sections is exactly the difference in treatment. Not luck. Not weather.
"The method produced the result the method should have produced.
"This is not an accident."
She underlined the last four words.
Then she capped the pen, put the notebook in her jacket pocket, picked up the spading fork, and moved to the next plant.
The full harvest came in over the last two weeks of September.
Ren worked it alone except for two mornings when Birch Tadwell appeared again without announcement, this time with a second fork, and worked a row parallel to hers without being asked to.
She didn't say much.
He didn't either.
They worked until noon both days, and she paid him from the cash box she kept in the barn.
He folded the bills without counting them in front of her, which she recognized as a kind of courtesy.
She kept detailed records throughout.
Every row harvested got its own line in the notebook: plant count, tuber count, estimated weight, soil section.
The discipline of it wasn't vanity.
It was the difference between knowing what had worked and believing what had worked.
She needed to know, not believe, because what she'd learned on these six acres was the template for what came next.
If she couldn't read the data accurately, she couldn't scale the method.
If she couldn't scale the method, Ridgeback stayed six acres of improved ground surrounded by 34 acres of clay waiting to be convinced.
By the end of the second week, the picture was clear enough to put numbers to.
The upper section, the best-draining third of the six acres, the ground that had received the most amendment, the section where the one surviving sprout had told her in April that something was possible, had produced at a rate that made her check her arithmetic twice before writing it in the notebook.
Not because it was a number that would impress anyone who hadn't seen what this ground looked like in March.
Because it was a number that confirmed specifically what the journal entry from 11 years ago had said was theoretically possible if the field ever received what it needed.
The lower section had produced less.
The numbers there were honest, better than the untreated ground would have given, meaningfully better, but carrying the signature of soil that was still early in its improvement.
Still fighting its own structure.
Still needing more seasons of what she'd started before it would perform the way the upper section had performed in its first year of treatment.
She wrote the overall summary at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening at the end of September with both notebooks open in front of her.
"Six acres out of 40 treated, drained, mulched, amended, planted, replanted.
"The six acres produced a real harvest, several times what untreated Ridgeback would have given. Proof that Earl's journal entry was correct.