End of Lockdown

And so Victoria's short, sharp lockdown has come to an end.

I had managed to avoid the temptation to panic buy toilet paper and all the other things that people seem to think they are at high risk of running out of during a lockdown. This is partly because thus far the shops have remained open during all our lockdowns. It is also because I seldom get to a stage where I run out of vital things. In any case, I hardly ever buy toilet paper in the shops.  I buy it, tissues and kitchen paper in bulk, online, from Who Gives a Crap - and quite fortuitously had put in an order a couple of days before the lockdown was announced. Each order keeps us ticking along for 7 or 8 months so I am not expecting to buy any more in the near future.

If I had thought about it, I might have gone out to the Mushroom Farm on the Thursday of last week. But I didn't think about it. We eat a lot of mushrooms and most certainly didn't have enough to last through the lockdown. We would have managed without, but our local IGA stocks their mushrooms.  They have long had sliced mushies from the farm, but I noticed on my one trip to the IGA over the past week that they had boxes of unsliced mushrooms as well.  I picked some up to tide us over.

We were just starting to run out of fresh vegetables when the lockdown finished. Both the Mushroom Farm and the Elaine Farmgate Shop had been out of range during the lockdown. Both of them now stock produce from the Spring Creek Vegetable Farm. So Lindsey and I celebrated the end of lockdown by visiting both of them yesterday. We don't usually go on Thursdays but there was no reason why not. So we did. I am now stocked up again on mushrooms, vegetables, eggs, sauces. Plus I have spinach, silver beet, and zucchini available in my garden and Lindsey has all of those plus lettuce, ripening tomatoes and kale in hers.

In other news, Stella is now home from the hospital. Wendy picked her up yesterday afternoon. I will head down to Mount Martha this morning and bring her up here for the weekend.  Lindsey will take her back on Monday. I have to say that the photo Wendy sent of Stella makes her look very much as though she has been on the losing side of a boxing bout with the Heavyweight Champion. Her head is swathed in bandages and she has a couple of very shiny black eyes. I think she should probably retire from her sparring career!

I have a new rain gauge. I had a small one which sat in a garden bed, until it got run over yesterday and broken. My father had been reading a rain gauge for many, many years in Mount Martha. I had intended to replace my little rain gauge with his, but the plastic was quite weathered and I didn't think would stand up to being attached to a metal fence. (I have to be quite firm when attaching things to our fences so the things need to be quite robust.) So now i have a new one, ready and waiting for rain. Which I am not expecting today!

No longer able to read the rain levels

This one is an exact replica of
the one my father had.
He had records going back many years