Fig. 1 — not our ground, but near enough. Cold, wet, and April.

Standing note to whoever is at this desk after me. Fill it out top to bottom and don't skip the lot number, that's the whole business right there. If the lot number is missing I can't pull the retained sample and if I can't pull the retained sample I am guessing, and I would rather not guess when there's a tin on the shelf with the answer in it.

Here is what you need to know about a letter that says nothing came up. That sentence is four different letters wearing one coat. One: the lot was dead or weak, which is ours. Two: the ground went in cold and wet and the seed sat there and rotted, which is April's. Three: she planted beet a full inch and a half down because the packet said so and her soil is Marshall silty clay and it crusted over hard after that rain the ninth, which is nobody's exactly. Four: she planted it and then two and a quarter inches came down Tuesday night and the row is now somewhere in the road ditch. Only the first one is the house's fault and from a desk in Shenandoah I cannot tell you which one it was and neither can you.

So we replace the packet. No argument, no questionnaire, no letter asking her to describe her soil. A packet of Detroit Dark Red costs this house eleven cents to put in an envelope and a customer who feels argued with costs us a name off the spring mailing, and the spring mailing is worth considerably more than eleven cents a name. Turnaround in this department is under four days from the mail room and I intend to keep it there.

On the germination test, since new people always ask. You count out four hundred seeds from the retained sample — four hundred, four hundreds of a hundred, don't eyeball it — and you lay them on damp blotter paper in the trays, and the trays go in the cabinet at seventy-seven degrees days and sixty-eight nights, and you count sprouts at day seven and you count again at day fourteen and the second count is the one you report. Federal minimum on beet is sixty-five percent. Lot 3341 tested eighty-one, which is good honest seed. Eighty-one percent also means nineteen seeds in a hundred were never going to do anything for anybody, and if Mrs. Ohlrich's clay took another twenty on top of that she has a thin row and a true grievance and a perfectly legal lot of seed, all three at once. Both things are the case. Send the packet.

Then finish the form. The form has a box for everything because I put a box for everything in it, and if you find something it doesn't have a box for, tell me and I'll have one printed. It is a good form.