What is Sabzeh?

Sabzeh is a small dish of freshly sprouted greens — usually wheat, lentils, or mung beans — grown specifically for the haft-sin table in the weeks before Nowruz. You start it from seed: soak the grains, spread them on a plate, keep them damp, and watch a thick green tuft rise over about ten days until it is lush enough to tie with a ribbon. It is the most literal of the haft-sin symbols, standing for rebirth and the return of growth after winter, and there is a quiet competitiveness in many families about whose sabzeh came in greenest and fullest this year.

The story does not end on the table. Because the sabzeh is believed to absorb the year's bad luck and stale energy as it sits through the two-week Nowruz period, you are not supposed to keep it. On Sizdeh Bedar, the thirteenth day, families take the sabzeh outdoors and throw it into running water — a stream, a river, the sea — to carry the old year's misfortune away. Unmarried young people sometimes tie knots in the blades before tossing it, making a wish to be married by next Nowruz. In the diaspora, the windowsill sabzeh becomes a small act of faith: growing a patch of Iran on an apartment ledge in a city where nobody else knows what the green tuft means.