Social distancing and “stay at home”, the new normal during the Covid-19 outbreak. But just because you have to stay at home, doesn't mean you have to sit in front of the tv all day watching re-runs or worse yet, the news.

Get out into your backyard and enjoy the spring weather, look at the buds on the trees starting to come out and plan now for backyard projects or a new garden. Seed potatoes and onion sets are in as well as all the seeds you may need. Also the starter plants (seedlings sold in packs) are starting to come in.

Cold crop plants like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale and kohlrabi can probably be planted in the garden now since you will be home to cover them if we are going to get a cold night into the twenties. The cold crop plants can take a light frost when the temperature gets down to thirty to thirty-four.

Planting cold crops early in the gardening season usually allows you to plant a second crop in July. Your first crop should be ready for harvest in mid to late June and then the garden can be replanted in July for a mid to late October harvest. Another quick crop that has become extremely popular is micro-greens. Micro-greens come in many different varieties as they are just sprouts.

Just like the old alfalfa sprouts that were popular twenty years ago, micro-greens are sprouts from many different crops like lettuce, broccoli, chia (yes, just like the ones you have spread on those chia pets for over fifty years), sunflower, kale and many others.

Producing micro-greens can be a little tricky at first, but watching a couple of videos from experts on youtube will point you in the right direction. Micro-green crops can take as little as eight days for the quickest crops like radish seeds, they require no fertilizer and because you can grow them indoors, no pesticides.

The micro-greens are packed with nutrients and vitamins, as you get the goodness from the whole plant wrapped up in a tiny package. Instead of taking a One-A-Day vitamin in the morning, just eat a helping of micro-greens at lunch or dinner. I say lunch or dinner because even though they are popular, those wheatgrass smoothies that some people drink for breakfast will never catch on with me. There are so many ways to start a garden these days and now almost everyone has the time.

Another way to have fun and social distance at the same time started this week with the opening day of trout season and the unofficial beginning of the entire fishing season, even though bass season doesn't get going until June. But hopefully you know how to tie a fly, as worms are in short supply as sporting goods stores and suppliers to that effect are not deemed essential businesses.

To that end, even though we are open and normally would have live bait, our bait supplier is not running as other sporting goods dealers that would carry live bait are closed. It is not financially viable for him to make a two hour trip to come to just one dealer. Now this brings up another problem with minnows.

We sell hundreds of minnows each week that are certified free of disease as required by New York State. This regulation has been in place for years to cut down on the amount of fish-bourne diseases that would travel between lakes by minnows being caught in one lake to be used in another.

Many diehard fishermen, may go back to netting their own bait if it is not readily available for purchase, rather than go to lures or poppers. Although most anglers are responsible, like Covid-19, it only takes one person to spread a disease that they never intended on spreading.