This week on the homestead has been a bit odd. All around us, people are having to change their lifestyles drastically due to COVID-19. Schools are shut down. Restaurants and other similar businesses in Tucson are all shut down. Since we live in a rural location and already home school, this hasn’t caused a big change in our family life for the short term. The biggest changes have been for me at work. There is a huge emphasis on cleanliness and keeping an eye on your own health.
To keep Lynn from having to go out, I did the family grocery shopping on Friday. The grocery store closest to us had been cleaned out of many staple foods like beans, rice, pasta and oats. Things like dried fruits, pickled vegetables and canned fruits were in limited supply. There were absolutely no paper products at all.
We only moved here at the end of August, so I hadn’t planned on doing much gardening this year. My plan was to try and find things to make compost out of this year and start the garden next year. I guess all this craziness got to me, and I am going to be putting in a few garden beds now. I have ordered the wire from Amazon that I need to keep the rabbits out. I also bought some wood for garden beds at Lowes.
Yesterday, we started to put in stakes for the fencing. Next week, I will be going to get the soil to fill in the 3 beds I will be building. It won’t be a huge garden, but it should hopefully give us some fresh produce. I plan to grow some things that are fairly quick like zucchini and green beans.
While we were putting in those stakes, we had a couple of vultures circling us. I hope they weren’t expecting us to die or something.
Our chickens are still doing well. We have 12 chicks right now. The original 6 are getting large and love to go into the run during the day. We moved the middle 3 into a cage in the coop so they can get a little bigger and hopefully the larger ones get used to them. The smallest three are still in a box in our living room. Those ones are good with people. One of them even likes to climb around on Lynn.
I hope you all are staying safe and healthy right now. I also thank you for taking the time to read a little about our life on the homestead.
-Joshua