The seed flat under the shop light

The seed flat is a black plastic tray with forty-eight square cells molded into it, roughly the length of a forearm, and in April it sits on a south-facing kitchen windowsill under a shop light hung from two chains. The light is a long metal housing holding two fluorescent tubes, and it hangs close enough that the heat off the tubes passes over the damp soil all day. The flat is never empty this month. Each cell holds a block of seed-starting mix, dark and crumbly, and each block has a seedling in it: tomatoes with stems the color of wine, peppers slower, marigolds up first. Everything outside is still waiting — the ground cold, the nights near freezing — but the flat runs on the shop light and the windowsill, and it has decided that spring is legal.

The seedlings lean. They lean toward the glass because the window is real light and the tubes are only imitation, and whoever is home at dusk turns the flat a quarter turn each evening, the way they might check the back door. By the middle of April the turning has become a habit with no thought behind it. Turn, water, look. The soil drinks faster than it did in March. In March the sun came at the sill low and sideways, and the shadows of the frames lay long across the cells. By mid-April the sun has climbed and the same sill gets an hour of afternoon light it did not get a month ago. The surface of the mix goes pale and dry in a single afternoon, so the flat gets its water not on schedule but on inspection, a knuckle pressed to the soil, the whole tray lifted by one end to feel its weight. A dry flat is heavier than it looks and then, suddenly, much lighter.

The flat is where it is because the garage is too cold and the spare room has no outlet at the right height, and a tray of seedlings is something you keep where you will see it. It has ended up on the sill above the sink, in the way of everything, with the water can and the bag of mix and the trowel taking up half the counter. The tubes are on a timer that clicks on before dawn and clicks off after nine, and the flat spends the long April evenings under their cold light, turning its leaves to the window.

April is a hard month on the flat itself. The cells crowd, the roots press against the bottoms, and in the last week of the month each block of soil lifts whole when held by the first true leaves, and the seedlings go out to the cold frame for hardening off. The flat is emptied cell by cell, and what stays behind on the sill is a crust of dried mix along the rims and a few broken stems. When the weather snaps cold again, as it does in April, the flat is carried back in and refilled from the same bag for a second round, and then it sits under the tubes with the crust still on its rim and the long side bowing a finger's width outward where the heat dried it and the water soaked it, turn about.