They dried nearly two tons of apples, which, if I
remember right, brought six cents a pound that year. The profit from
that venture alone nearly paid for the haymaker.
The weather was bright the next haying time, so bright indeed that it
was scarcely worth while to dry grass in the haymaker; and the next
summer was just as sunny. It was in the spring of that second year that
Theodora and Ellen asked whether they might not put their boxes of
flower seeds and tomato seeds into the haymaker to give them an earlier
start, for the spring suns warmed the ground under the glass roof while
the snow still lay on the ground outside. In Maine it is never safe to
plant a garden much before the middle of May; but we sometimes tried to
get an earlier start by means of hotbeds on the south side of the farm
buildings. In that way we used to start tomatoes, radishes, lettuce and
even sweet corn, early potatoes, carrots and other vegetables, and then
transplanted them to the open garden when settled warm weather came.
The girls' suggestion gave us the idea of using the haymaker as a big
hothouse. The large area under glass made the scheme attractive.
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