The trees signed, and the farm learns to carry water

The owner signed the new trees at breakfast – “love the trees, let’s replace all” – so they are the trees now, and the sheet ones sit behind a switch. Then he redesigned the farm’s rhythm in one message. A felled tree should leave just the stump, no square of soil; a planted one should look like a small version of the tree it will be, and grow; and growing, for crops and saplings both, should run on WATER. You plant, you water, you harvest – working at a growing thing does nothing, only water hurries it, and a thing left dry still grows, slowly. The well on the green is where water comes from, and the carry is a watering can, not a bucket, in the hand where the hoe was.

That is what was built. A field sown today grows on its own at a third of the pace until somebody pours a can on it; a can holds six charges and fills at the well, which never runs dry; the hero holds the one key at the well, at a sown plot, at a planted stump. The farmer carries a can too: he gathers what is ripe, waters what he sowed, sows the next plot, and walks to the well when the can is empty – which is the “less supervised job” the owner asked for, since one farmer with a can covers several plots. The reseeder waters what it plants, and when no stump waits it plants new trees on the free ground nearest the saw mill, the next one a step further out, so the woods grow around the industry that eats them. A seedling is the tree’s own model at a sixth of its size, and it scales up as the clock runs, so every tree’s age reads from across the field. A gate proves the five hand-offs – the hero’s fill, the hero’s pour on a plot and on a sapling, the farmer’s and the reseeder’s – and the ten-seed band reads how much the walk to the well costs the economy.