A row of cucumber frames and some greenhouses stood at the bottom of the garden.  The latter were mostly devoted to young tomato plants, though one was specially reserved for vegetable marrows.  The students had to learn how to manage and regulate the heating apparatus of the houses, as well as to understand the culture of the plants.

“I left a window open once,” confessed Miss Heald.  “I remembered it when I had been about an hour in bed, and I jumped up and dressed in a hurry, and went out with a lantern to shut it.  Fortunately there was no frost that night, or all the seedlings might have been killed.  It was a most dreadful thing to forget!  I thought Miss Carson would have jumped on me, but she was ever so nice about it.”

Despite the predominance of foodstuffs there were a few flowers in the garden, clumps of forget-me-not and narcissus, purple iris, golden saxifrages and scarlet anemones.  There were fragrant bushes of lavender and rosemary, and beds of sweet herbs, thyme, and basil and fennel and salsafy, for Miss Carson believed in some of the old-fashioned remedies, and made salves and ointments and hair washes from the products of her garden.  The orchard, full of pink-blossomed apple trees, was a refreshing sight.  They opened a little gate, and walked under a wealth of drooping flowers to the poultry yard that lay at the further side.  Everything here was on the most up-to-date system.  Pens of beautiful white Leghorns, Black Minorcas and Buff Orpingtons were kept in wired inclosures, each with its own henhouse and scratching-shed full of straw.  Miss Heald took Winona inside to inspect the patent nesting-boxes, and the grit-cutting machine.  She also showed her the incubators.

“They’re empty now, but you should have seen them in the early spring, when they were full of eggs,” she explained.  “It was a tremendous anxiety to keep the lamps properly regulated.  Miss Nelson and I sat up all night once when some prize ducklings were hatching.  It was cold weather, and they weren’t very strong, so they needed a little help.  It’s the most frightfully delicate work to help a chick out of its shell!  It makes a little chip with its beak, and then sometimes it can’t get any further, and you have gently to crack the hole bigger.  Unless you’re very careful you may kill it, but on the other hand, if it can’t burst its shell when it’s ready to hatch, it may suffocate, so it’s a choice of evils.  We put them in the drying pen first, and then in the ‘foster mother.’  They’re like babies, and have to be fed every two hours.  It’s a tremendous business when you have hundreds of them, at different stages and on different diets.  We seemed to be preparing food all day long.  It’s ever so fascinating, though!”

“I love them when they’re like fluffy canaries,” said Winona.