The farm is alive and kicking. It’s been about 21 days since my first journal entry on the pandemic, more than two weeks since our last grocery shop, and more than 12 days since I was last off the property (except for a couple of walks up the road to stretch our legs). We do need to go to town on Friday (in 2 days) to pick up a farm share box we ordered from local farms through Unity FarmDrop.
Even without a really focused “prepper” mindset, we’ve found our lifestyle already well-adapted to quarantine/confinement. And coincidentally we had just revamped some of our larder storage practices earlier this year, so we were ready with a system for knowing exactly what staples we might be short of.
I’ve been baking bread and cake, and we’re going through some of our freezer goods, though honestly not much faster than than we normally do. I was on the early curve of stocking up on pharmacy and toiletries, really before it began to sink in with most people that this degree of trouble was on the horizon. I credit our scientific education and our care in consuming reliable news.
The only regular staple that we’re truly out of is fresh milk, but cereal is optional and the only other thing besides certain recipes that we use milk for is my morning coffee. We got a supply of shelf-stable mini-creamers, but I don’t love them either from a taste perspective or from a plastic-waste perspective, so I am bracing to switch to black, which is how I enjoyed coffee when I was in my 20s. For recipes we have evaporated and dry milk.
The chickens, though, resumed laying just in time, and eggs are a great resource. The things we order online are all delayed (dogfoods, etc.) so we make sure to order early and often.
For farm animals, we got our local supplier to bring us a backup supply of 6 round bales so we’d have resilience in case anything happened to her or us. Having those out there covered in a mishmash of tarps has been a real relief. And we continue to take 2 bales every 2 weeks, so the supply holds steady.
The weather has been gradually warming, punctuated with little freak snow showers. We had a dusting yesterday and again this morning, giving us a great display of wild animal tracks all over the property — deer, fox, cat, bobcat, porcupine. The world carries on.