The greenhouse is on a computer that logs the temperature, the humidity and every drop of water the irrigation puts down, bench by bench, because plants that are overwatered die and plants are stock. Bench fourteen is cleared, bare staging, from October to March. Every night at five the humidity over it rises the way it does when a can is poured, a can's worth, and in the morning there are pots on it. Seedlings. In trays. The kind we sow in February, in November, with the labels written in a hand we do not have.
I am the plant area manager at a garden centre and the greenhouse computer is the thing I trust and bench fourteen is the thing I do not.
The log.
The big greenhouse is on a climate computer. Temperature and humidity at every bench, the irrigation booms logged to the litre, so I know what every bench has had and when, because a tray of plugs that has been watered twice is a tray of plugs that has rotted, and that is money.
Bench fourteen is empty from October. Staging, bare, wiped down. The irrigation over it is off.
At five every morning, before light, the humidity over fourteen rises.
The rise.
The shape a can makes. Not a boom, which is a steady rise along the bench: a can, a spike at one end and the spike moving along, the way a person walks a bench with a watering can and gives each tray its share. About ten litres. The temperature over the bench rises by a degree for the time it takes, which is what a person does to the air around them, and then it falls, and the log is flat again.
In the morning there are trays on the bench. Seed trays, the old wooden kind, which we do not use, with compost in them, and in the compost, seedlings. Up. At the stage they are at two weeks from sowing. Labelled, with a wooden label in each tray, in pencil, with the variety, and the varieties are ones we grow, and some we do not any more, and the hand is an old hand, a gardener's, the kind that writes labels for a living.
I clear the bench. In the morning the trays are back, and the seedlings are a day further on.
What has been checked.
The sensors over fourteen, replaced. The spike is there.
The bench, at five, by me, beside it, in the dark, in the cold. The trays were not there. I heard the tap. The one at the end of the house, the brass one, turning, and a can filling, and the can being lifted, and the walk along the bench, the sound of the can's rose on compost, a tray at a time, the pause to look, and the next, and beside me the air warmed the degree it warms with a person in it, and there was the smell of a pipe, and the trays were on the bench, and I put my hand on one and the compost was wet and warm and the seedlings were up.
Who.
The garden centre was a nursery before it was a garden centre, a real one, that grew its own, and the man who grew it had bench fourteen for forty years, the old staff say, because it was nearest the boiler and the warmest, and he raised the year's bedding on it from seed, starting in the dead of winter, when nobody else would, because he said the plants knew when they were wanted.
He retired when the nursery became a garden centre and stopped growing and started buying in, and the staff say he had not been able to understand that, and had come in for a while, and had stood at fourteen, and had gone home, and had died the second winter after.
He is sowing. Every year, from October, on the bench nearest the boiler, and the seedlings come on, and in March, when the bench is wanted for stock, the trays are gone, and the staff who have been here longest say that the bedding the centre buys in every spring is never as good as the bedding that was on fourteen, and that they have been saying that for twenty years.
What is done about it.
The water is on the log every night as an unmetered event and the climate computer's supplier has been asked why bench fourteen logs a watering with the irrigation off and has said that the sensors are reading a person with a can, which is what they are for, and has not been asked again.
What I do.
I manage the plants.
Seedlings need pricking out. At two weeks, when they are up, they go from the seed tray to a bigger one, a plant at a time, by hand, or they choke each other. He sows them. Nobody pricks them out. They come on for two weeks on fourteen and then they stop, because they are too close, and the trays in March are trays of seedlings that were never moved on.
So I move them. At seven, when I come in, I take the trays on fourteen and I prick them out, the way I was taught when I was sixteen and this was a nursery, into the plug trays we use now, one seedling at a time, and I label them with his labels, and I put them on fifteen, under the irrigation, and they grow.
They are good plants. That is the thing I had forgotten. The bedding off fourteen, pricked out and grown on, is better than anything I buy in, and it is on the benches in the spring with his labels in it, and it sells, and the log over fourteen, since I started, has a second spike every morning, at seven, which is me, and the man with the can, when I am at the bench at five, has started to leave one tray at the end unwatered, which is the tray a nurseryman leaves for the person who will prick it out, because you do not water a tray you are about to handle, and I have understood that I have been taken on.