<Hooked

I can’t wait any longer. I pull open my seed box, an old oak case that was home to file cards in some long-ago office, stuffed now with envelopes of seeds. I arrange them according to the date they go in the ground: beans outdoors in early June, melons indoors in late April, spinach in the garden at the end of March or as soon as the ground thaws, tomatoes and peppers under lights in mid March, and in February, impatiens, which is how I feel—impatient for growing things.

Impatiens seeds are as fine as the coloured sprinkles I scatter on cupcakes for the Grand Girls. I’ve done this for years, press seeds into soil, but still I find it hard to believe that each tiny pellet will become a full-grown plant. The puddle of seed in the palm of my hand is enough to populate the broad bed at the base of the apple tree, with plenty left over to spot colour through the woodland garden, the shrubbery, and around the Grand Girls’ playhouse.

I plant too much, I always do. I collect too much, save too much, sow too much. My enthusiasms overtake me. I’d plant too early, too, if I could, but like a drunk who hides his bottles behind books on the library shelf, I stash the planting pots along a wall that is obscured every fall by our winter supply of wood, in a place carefully calculated not to be exposed before the middle of February. This year, my plan backfired: the weather has been mild, which means the wood pile diminished more slowly than usual. My pots were trapped, my seeds unplanted, my fingers becoming twitchy until finally, on the last Sunday of the month, in a frenzy, I tossed the fuel wood aside.

I haul the pots up from the basement, together with the bag of professional potting soil I bought last fall and the child’s wet-play tray I use for mixing. If I were more of a purist, I’d bag my own screened compost in September and sift it together with sand and perlite, but the chemistry confounds me. I’ve never been able to produce a mix sufficiently light and sterile, and the truth is, I don’t care enough to learn. I don’t make my own tools, either. Some things are best left to the professionals.

I lay out my supplies on the kitchen counter like a supplicant. Scoops of various sizes. A shot glass of toothpicks. Plates of a certain colour: one red, one white. Grease pencil sharpened to a point.

I always plant on a Sunday. I water my indoor plants on Sundays, too. I grew up in a family that dressed for church on the seventh day, then gathered for the Sunday roast, followed by a quiet afternoon of reading and playing games. Scrabble. Snakes and Ladders. Parcheesi. Small rituals to mark the week, both an end and a beginning.

“Playing in the dirt again?” my Beloved asks, coming into the kitchen as I pour a pitcher of warm water into the crater at the top of the mountain of soil in the tray. I sink my hands in, working in the water, kneading the earth. I close my eyes and smile. He kisses my cheek. “Enjoy.”

Plants at our house have had all manner of beginnings. My first seedlings came to life in egg cartons on a windowsill. For a time, I used a brass press that formed the damp potting mix into cubes with a depression in the top where I’d press a single seed. The squares sat in a tray and soaked up water on all sides, so that the young roots spread evenly and robustly. But the trays disappeared in one move or another and although it is one of those things I look for at every yard sale, I have never found a decent substitute.

Mostly, I use recycled nursery pots, thin black plastic divided into four or six or eight cells that I scrub before I plant. (I pick them up at the dump, from neighbours and friends.) I like to start small, transplanting once or twice as the seedling grows. I tell myself that planting seeds into a pot that will accommodate a full-sized plant is like laying a baby in the middle of a king-size bed, but the truth is I do it, too, for the pleasure of holding the tiny stems, cradling them pot to pot.

I pour the seed onto a plate—white for the black seed, red for white seed—then I wet a toothpick on my tongue and pick up the seeds one by one, tapping them into place, one to a pot. Book experts advise planting three to a pot, but I can’t bring myself to pinch off the weakest two, the way they tell me to. Instead, I lift them to other pots, ending up with three times more seedlings than I need. Better to limit my urges where I can.

Each seed contains a store of food and a dormant embryo that, exposed to the right balance of light and warmth and water, will sprout into a plant. In my boundless optimism, I expect every seed to sprout, but a plant is more pragmatic, producing thousands of seeds in the hopes that a few will survive to carry its genetic message into the future. Seed may be blown on the wind, fall on barren ground, slip into a dormancy that might never be broken.

Most of my seed is fresh, gathered from last year’s garden, but the season was bad for impatiens. Whenever I went looking, the stems were either bare or the pods had already burst, scattering seed on the ground where it would succumb to winter frosts. Good thing I never use all the seed I collect and never throw out the leftovers, which means I always have seed, in some cases, envelopes that date back as long as I have gardened. I imagine myself in some apocalyptic future, doling out my seed to neighbours and passersby, restocking the blasted earth.

The delusions of gardeners.

But it could happen. Archeologists excavating King Herod's palace near the Dead Sea recently found some seed from a date palm, Phoenix dactylifera. It sprouted, producing a palm carbon-dated at about 2,000 years. And in China, some ancient Asian water lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) germinated after 1,200 years. I’ve heard that seed from an Arctic lupine (Lupinus arcticus), found in a lemming burrow in the tundra, germinated and flowered after 10,000 years of dormancy. Surely my three-year-old seed will sprout.

All afternoon I pat warm soil into pots and press a seed in each, labelling as I go. I used to take my cue from the nurseries and stick little tags in the pots, but they’d get knocked out or the writing would fade and I wouldn’t know what I had until the plants bloomed. Now I write the name of the plant on the side of the pots as I plant.

Wash. Pat. Press. Write.

“Why do you do it?” my Beloved asks, as he sets up the tiers of grow-lights. I’ve been at it for hours. My nails are dark with potting mix and I have dabs of soil on my nose where I push up my glasses. He can tell my back is sore: I’m slumped over my wet-play tray, squeezing one last batch of mix. I started with impatiens but though I know it’s too early, I’ve moved on to tomatoes and peppers, celery, celeriac, leeks, some early lettuce. “You could buy all this for a few dollars.”

He’s right. I could march into any nursery and bring home trays of exactly the right number of seedlings already hardened off, standing tall, ready to go in the ground. No months of careful watering and shifting pots under the lights to counteract the lean of stems. No anxious vigil for damping off.

“I could,” I agree, “but I can’t.”

I hand him trays that he slides into tight rows under the lights, paying close attention to the names I’ve written in white grease pencil on the black sides of the pots. This is just the beginning: I’ll be planting every Sunday for the next few weeks, working my way through the brassicas to the melons and fall flowers. By the time I am finished, every square inch of free space in our house will be under lights, the dining room table covered, too, with pots nursing seeds that stir to life in darkness.

“Why not?” he says, straightening after his labours.

I lay a finger on the soil. It has cooled to the temperature of the lights. It’s a waiting game now, as the embryo absorbs the food stored within the seed. In a month or a week or a few days, depending on the species, an embryonic root will swell, breaking through the seed coat to poke downward; a soft plumule will push up. In some plants, the first leaves, the cotyledon, will remain underground, but in others, the ones I wait for, the “hook” of the plumule will push up through the soil, lifting the cotyledon into the air. Sometimes, the seed coat is still attached to the greening leaves, and I grasp it gently, slipping it off the leaves that burst apart and spread with what looks like a sigh of joy.

That pleasure is still ahead of me. For now, I attach the timers one by one, setting them to the length of a summer’s day. From this moment on, I’ll wake to the glow of daylight in my kitchen, no matter that the sun isn’t yet up. I’ll peer into the pots, into the loamy dampness of this soil, and wait for those tiny green hooks to lift the leaves into the light.

When the eldest Grand Girl was born, I was there to see her first breath, hear her first cry, see her first look at the world. My heart lifted then as it will again, at the sight of those fragile green hooks.

I turn to my Beloved. “And miss all this?”