The row had come up too thick. Carrot seed is fine as pepper and you never sow it as thin as you mean to, so it comes up in a green mob, the feathery tops crowding shoulder to shoulder down the drill, every seedling healthy and every one in the next one’s way.
They cannot all stay. That is the whole cruelty of it. Crowded, they make a row of pale threads, all of them stunted, none of them a carrot. You have to pull the good ones so the good ones can grow.
I went down on my knees in the path. The soil was damp from the night, dark, cool under the nails. You thin to a finger’s width. You leave one and take the two beside it, and the one you leave is not better than the two you pull. It is only luckier. It is only spaced.
The pulled ones come with a small tearing at the root, a whisper of held soil letting go. Each one already had the start of a carrot on it, a white thread no thicker than the stem, sweet if you bit it, too small to be worth the wash.
I worked down the row and left a survivor every finger-width, standing alone now with room around it, looking suddenly sparse where a minute ago it had looked full.
The pulled seedlings went in a heap on the path beside me. A wilting green pile, roots up, hundreds of them, all viable, all finished.
They were limp before I reached the end of the row. I left the pile where it lay. By evening it had flattened to a dark smear on the path, and the smell of them, that green sharp carrot smell, stayed on my fingers through supper.