And the cost was the emerging seedlings nearest the damage that had been pressed down by debris and had not come back up yet. She moved. She covered what she could. She worked for 4 hours without stopping. First in the eastern section, then methodically across the middle rows, finally to the western boundary, where the denser small-vessel placement was actually performing the function she had redesigned it for.
The pots were lower profile and had been pressed in more deeply and the loss there was minor. Two covers displaced. No cracked walls. By the time the wind dropped in the afternoon, she had reset 31 covers, reburied six exposed shoulders, and located the two cracked vessels. She had also found, in the worst section of the eastern rows, evidence of a larger problem.
When she pressed her fingers into the soil in a section roughly 8 ft wide and 15 ft long, the resistance was wrong. The ground felt honeycombed in a way that tamped soil shouldn't feel, as though the wind had done something to the compaction below the surface in the area where the storm had driven hardest. She dug a test hole with her hands and found the soil around one of the buried vessels was loose enough to let her slide her palm four inches into the surrounding gap without effort. That was not a maintenance issue. That was a structural failure.
A vessel that couldn't press against packed surrounding soil would have no pressure gradient across its porous walls. The water wouldn't migrate outward into the root zone. It would just sit in a loose chamber losing energy in all directions without reaching any specific root system. Three years of planning would produce a wet patch in the middle of the field and confused crops that couldn't find the moisture they needed. She dug two more test holes.
Both were the same. She stood in the damaged section in the late afternoon light and felt the specific weight of a problem that would not respond to working harder. This was not a matter of spending more time. The soil compaction had to be done correctly or the vessels were worthless and she could not tamp individual holes in sequence fast enough to compensate for what the storm had already done across that eight-by-fifteen-foot section. Not before the planting window closed.
Not by herself. She was standing there counting vessels in the compromised section, nineteen by her estimate when she heard the horse. Silas came around the barn and took in the field and then looked at her face and didn't say hello. "How bad?" he said. She showed him the test holes.
He pressed his hand into the same gaps and felt what she'd felt and stood up with soil on his palm. He looked at the sky, the afternoon light fading. Maybe three good hours left before darkness made the work impractical. "How many need to come out and go back in?"
"Nineteen in the worst section. Possibly more on the edges I haven't tested yet." "How long each one?" She had already been calculating. Excavate, test surrounding compaction, rebuild the base, reset the vessel, pack and tamp.