About this time, too, we started the hotbeds, a long row of them on the south side of the kitchen. The fresh manure cost us $2 a load, for, owning but one horse, we did not have enough in our stable; and, as Stella said, the piles “steamed expensively,” like small volcanoes, as they stood waiting in the sun after a warm, drenching shower. We were all impatience to start our beds, but Mike kept us waiting till the soil temperature had gone down. Then the sowing began. While Mike was putting in his beds large quantities of cauliflowers, which had proved one of our most profitable crops the year before, and celery and lettuce and tomatoes and peppers and radishes and cabbages, we divided our beds into one-foot squares, and sowed our different colours of antirrhinum, asters, stock, Phlox Drummondi, cosmos, annual larkspur, heliotrope, and Dimorphotheca Aurantiaca, a plant chosen by Stella because she said the name irresistibly appealed to a philologist. Later we agreed that that was about its only appeal.
While the hotbeds were sprouting, demanding their daily water and nightly cover, there was the ploughing to be done, the perennial beds to be uncovered, the new beds by the pool to be made ready, more pruning to be accomplished, and consequently more litter to be removed, birds to be watched for excitedly, and crocus spears in the grass, and, of course, the little lawn beyond the pool to be sowed to grass, and some grass seeds worked into the sundial lawn, which was still thin and patchy.
“Oh, I don’t know which is the real sign of spring,” said Stella, one evening, as we wandered on the terrace before the south room and heard the shrill chorus of the Hylas from our swamp. “Sometimes I think it’s the Hylas, on the first warm evening; sometimes I think it’s the fox sparrows who appeared suddenly the other day at 10.01 a.m. while you were working, and began hippity-hopping all over the grass. Sometimes I think it’s the soft coot-coot of our new hens in the sun. Sometimes I think it’s a crocus leaf. Sometimes I think it’s the steaming manure piles. Sometimes it seems to be the figures of Mike and Joe driving old Dobbin and the plough, against the sky and the lone pine, like a Millet painting.”
“Lump them,” I suggested. “It’s all of them combined. In New York it is when the soda fountains have to be extended over the toothbrush counter.”
“New York!” sniffed Stella. “There is no such place!”
April flew past us on gauzy wings, and May came, with violets by our brook and in our pasture, and the trilliums we had transplanted the year before burst into bud. Nearly all our perennials had come through the winter, thanks to the sixty-seven days of snow, and the one plant of blue May phlox which had survived its fall planting made us eager for a second trial, the next time in early spring. More sowings of peas went into the ground. The sundial was set out. Hard Cider came to build our pergola, and the clematis vines arrived to grow over it. The grape arbour along the west side of the sundial lawn was also built, of plain chestnut. The perennials were all moved to their permanent places, the beds fertilized and trimmed.
About the first of May, too, I took a tip from Luther Burbank and put early corn into a mixture of leaf mould and fresh manure in a big box. When the time came the middle of the month for the first planting, my seeds had developed snaky white roots and stalks. Again to Mike’s disgust, I made a long trench and put these sprouted seeds in thickly. In a couple of days they were up, and by the time his conventionally planted hills had sprouted, I had a long row of well-started corn which I thinned out to the strongest stalks.
“Now, Mike,” said I, “I’ll beat you and the town in the market.”
“Well, bedad, it beats all how you fellers that don’t know nothin’ about farmin’ can do some things,” he said, regarding my corn with comical amazement.
“That’s because we are willing to learn,” said I, and left him still looking at the six-inch high stalks.