Seeds 51 
boards, cover them with papers to sit on and it will be as warm 
and cozy a work as if I were knitting by the fire.” 
Adam never nags; he knows how far a prudent husband 
should go, and having gone the full distance, he waves a fare- 
well hand as I pursue my arbitrary way. On this occasion he 
gallantly trundled the wheelbarrow down through the drifts 
that still lay two feet deep in the runway, and up to the hot- 
bed that was steaming under the glass. 
I filled my space with seeds of annuals, drawing shallow 
furrows through the earth, dropping in a few seeds sparingly, 
and smoothing the earth over them. One of the chief difficul- 
ties with amateurs is that they sow seed too thickly. Seeds 
look so small that it is hard to realize the space a single plant 
will cover. I knew a man once who sowed three packages of 
Shirley poppy-seed in a bed a foot wide and four feet long, and 
then asked if he ought not to have put in more! The rule is 
to plant seeds to the depth of three or four times their size, but, 
if very fine, seeds should be merely scattered on the surface 
and pressed in lightly. Some are too fine to strew properly 
and may be mixed with a little fine earth, and then scattered. 
After a row was sown I pressed down the earth until it made 
a slightly depressed line in order that the water might settle 
in these depressions and sink in gradually. Each row was 
carefully marked with its name upon small portions of a 
strawberry box that had been torn into inch strips. 
I hovered about that hotbed like a bee about a honey pot, 
lifting the front edge a trifle each sunny day to let in the air, 
carefully replacing it at night. As the weather grew warmer 
the lid was raised still higher, so that the young plants should 
be gradually hardened. By the middle of May I had perhaps 
thirty varieties of annuals ready to set out, and felt the same 
triumph a physician would, who had brought a community 
through a cholera epidemic without losing a life. 
