Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Finn walked the rows at five in the morning, before the heat settled in.
The rows didn't negotiate, didn't perform, didn't present a version of themselves designed to manage your expectations.
They were exactly what they were. A plant under heat stress looked like a plant under heat stress.
Early ripening looked like early ripening.
You could note it and address it, or you could note it and lie to yourself about it, and Finn had found over three years that the lying cost more in the end.
Plants didn't have a byline. They didn't fudge the details to make a better story. They didn't look at what he'd built here and see material. They just grew. Or they didn't. Either way, they told the truth about it.
"The Brandywines aren't looking so hot." Boyd was late making it into town. But he was always on time when it came to the farm. Likely because his commute was a walk across the pastures from the small ranch house he shared with his wife.
Finn had already been thinking about the Brandywines. "Heat stress. The ripening's ahead by about ten days."
Boyd crouched slowly and turned a low-hanging fruit in his hand without picking it. The shoulder coloring was off; an early blush where there should have been another week of green. "Yield?"
"Down. I'm estimating twenty percent, maybe more depending on the next two weeks." He made a note on the pad he carried for rows. "I'll update the market inventory. The bisque quantity holds. I'm using the Cherokee Purples for that, anyway."
Boyd set the fruit back and straightened with the careful geometry of a man who'd learned to protect his joints. He had something to say, but was biding his time. Finn assumed it was about another crop. He was dead wrong.
"That clip has over a hundred thousand views."
"Clip? What clip?"
Boyd was looking at his phone. "One hundred and eighty thousand people have seen the clip, which is a big deal."
Oh. That clip.
"I looked up her channel. For professional reasons. She has three hundred and forty thousand subscribers and a reach that could significantly improve your foot traffic, definitely your website traffic."
"I don't have a website."
"Precisely the problem."
Finn picked up his row notes and went into the barn.
Boyd followed, because Boyd always followed, which was one of the things Finn valued about him and also regularly found exhausting. "She said something nice about your tomatoes," Boyd said. "In an earlier video. Before she knew your name."
"I'm aware."
"Wait? You watched her channel? I didn't think you knew how to get on social media."
"I read the transcript," Finn said.
"There's no transcript."
"It auto-generated."
Finn set the row notes on the workbench and looked at the wall of seed packets organized by variety and year, which was something he could look at without the current conversation applying to it.
The Cherokee Purple packet from his first year was in a sealed sleeve in the back.
The germination rate of the stored seeds was still above seventy percent.
Some things held if you kept them right.
"She has a good palate," he said. "She describes flavors accurately. That's relevant if there's going to be any continued market adjacency."
"Sure," Boyd said.
"The foot traffic numbers are real. She drew browsers to the north end who wouldn't otherwise have come down the lane."
Boyd looked at him. Boyd had a very specific face for this kind of statement, one that combined complete comprehension with the magnanimous decision not to fully deploy it. He used it now.
"The three hundred and forty thousand subscribers," Boyd said. "That's a lot of people who eat food. Maybe you should think about doing another post with her. Maybe getting her out here to the ranch to see what we're doing."
Finn shook his head. Sharing a parking space with Ivy Lopez was one thing. Having her in his space, walking his rows, getting any closer to that sugary scent of hers was not in his cards.
Finn pushed off the barn wall and headed for the door. "I'm going to fix the fence post on the east side while I'm here."
"It doesn't need—"
"It's leaning."
Finn grabbed a hammer on his way out. But no nails. Didn't matter. The fence was leaning, but it just needed the current nail that had lost its way to be pounded back on the right path. After Finn had pounded the wayward nail into submission, he pulled out his phone.
Ivy's truck had drawn real traffic to his truck; the numbers were clear on that. He opened her channel and looked at the subscriber count. Three hundred and forty-two thousand. The sign war clip was at two hundred and twenty-three thousand. There were twelve hundred comments. He did not read them.
He navigated to the earlier video. The one from Cincinnati, before she knew his name.
She was sitting somewhere — a restaurant, from the look of it, the kind with linen napkins and a menu that used the word artisanal — and she'd ordered the bruschetta and was holding a slice up to the camera with the expression of someone who was about to be honest about something in public.
"The tomato is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the preparation where the balsamic was meant to shine.
" She tilted the slice slightly. "The flesh is pale at the center. Mealy. The kind of texture you get when a tomato has been picked green and gassed to color because nobody in the supply chain has trusted it to ripen on its own schedule. The acidity is there, but it’s thin — one-dimensional. "
Finn wanted to give her a bite of one of his heirlooms. He wanted her to know that he knew a tomato should have sweetness to its texture, along with firmness.
He looked at the Cherokee Purples, ready to be plucked off the vine. He picked one from the vine. Turned it in his hand.
On screen, Ivy was still talking. The bruschetta restaurant had been replaced by something else now, something involving what appeared to be a dessert that was primarily a vehicle for a quantity of sugar he found medically concerning.
The voice had changed back. Bright, warm, half an octave up, the audience-voice he'd clocked that first Saturday.
"Oh my goodness, you have to try this; it's absolutely…"
She knew what a tomato was supposed to taste like.
She knew it the way he knew it: from the ground up, from attention paid, from the vocabulary of someone who had eaten enough bad ones to understand what a good one meant.
She had the palate and the language and the eye, and she was using all of it in service of whatever that dessert was, and he did not understand how those two things lived in the same person.
He ate the Cherokee Purple over the bench. It was, even slightly past window, excellent.
He closed his phone. Picked up his pen and went back to the row notes. The Brandywines were the problem in front of him. He would focus on the Brandywines.