Grampy Fernside's Arc

Chapter 4 of 16

Morning came clear. Grampy checked the wire frame in the shed and found it dry. The seeds rattled softly when he lifted the basket. Three more nights and they would be ready for soil. But ready for soil meant nothing if he did not know how to plant them. He had never grown this bloom. No one alive had. The tin held no slip of paper, no scratch of ink telling him how deep or how far apart nineteen seeds should sit. He carried the basket to the lean-to he had built against the south wall of the shed. Clay pots sat in rows on the bench. Cloth curtains hung at the open front to break the wind. He set the basket down and pulled his garden diary from the shelf. The fern-stamped cover was soft from years of handling. He turned to the back, where he kept notes on seeds he had only read about. The page for this bloom held three lines copied from an old trader's almanac. None of them mentioned depth. He went out to the half-barrel he had turned over last week. The soil inside was dark and loose, the same mix he planned to use in the secret bed. A test patch. He had set it up for exactly this reason, though he had hoped the tin would tell him what to test for. It had not. He would have to guess, and then watch. From the corner of the lean-to he took the notched stake he used for spacing rows. The cuts marched up the wood at one-inch steps. He laid it flat across the barrel and pressed nine shallow dimples into the soil along its length, at three different depths and three different spacings. A grid. He had a small jar of common bean seeds on the bench. Beans were not the bloom, but beans pushed up fast and would show him which depth and spacing let a sprout open without choking. "You're planting beans in your fancy dirt," Togg said from the shed doorway. He had come out to sit in the sun. "Beans tell the truth in four days," Grampy said. "The seeds I care about get planted after." "Four days is what you've got." "I know." He pressed one bean into each dimple, covered them, and wrote the grid into the diary with the depth and spacing marked beside each spot. He set the stake upright at the edge of the barrel as a marker. The seeds in the basket would dry for three more nights. The beans would sprout in four days, maybe five. The timing would be close, but the test would answer the question before he committed nineteen irreplaceable seeds to blind dirt. He closed the diary and set it on the bench. For the first time since the tin came out of the shed, he knew what tomorrow looked like.