Drew Barrymore Took up Interesting New Hobbies Like Raising Chickens While in Isolation

While Drew Barrymore isolated with her daughters, Olive and Frankie, she also decided to take on a few new hobbies in the pandemic. Though she confessed to being afraid of all the death in the world around her, she wanted to show her daughters there was still life to look forward to. So, she became a landscaper at her new house and started a vegetable garden. And she also bought chicks to help raise into full-grown pet chickens.

Drew Barrymore turns to nature ‘when faced with the peril of mortality’

In Barrymore’s lifestyle book, Rebel Homemaker, she notes life felt like it was “hanging in the balance” while she was “locked inside” with Olive and Frankie due to the pandemic in 2020. She had also recently purchased their house and it was still new to them.

The sage-like star shares that she was alone in the home with her kids for “several months” and wanted to find projects that might help restore some of their optimism. “Looking back, I realize how much I turn to nature when faced with the peril of mortality,” she writes.

She took on brand new endeavors despite ending each day “maxed out” from Zoom meetings. “… There wasn’t much energy left after school and trying to get [The Drew Barrymore Show] off the ground,” she shares. But she still wanted to help her kids focus on “something that represented life …”

Drew Barrymore bought chicks to raise with Olive and Frankie

Barrymore writes in Rebel Homemaker she bought six chicks from a hatchery. Then, she and her daughters placed them all under a heat lamp and cared for them as they matured. “The chickens grew and started to look really different,” she shares, “and finally moved outside from under the heat lamp.”

“We wish they had laid eggs, but they weren’t old enough yet,” she adds. On a 2020 episode of The Drew Barrymore Show about pet fashion and sweaters for chickens, the beauty mogul shared pictures of her own pets with adorable names like Sparkles, Ferdinand, and Blanche.

Drew Barrymore started a vegetable garden and landscaped her yard

With no one around to help but Olive and Frankie, Barrymore also decided to go to work in the yard. “I took my yard, which was completely bare when I bought the house — it was really just a wonderful blank canvas of brown grass — and went to work,” she writes. “I learned how to plant vegetable boxes so we could eat the food I grew.”

Barrymore shares she “started becoming [her] own landscaper” through trips to the nursery and well-researched plant purchases. But the one-time child superstar learned more than how to plant things. She also learned about the items she was growing.

“I learned what perennials and evergreens are,” she explains. “I learned which plants bloom when and what their Latin names are.”

She decided to take on the project “wholeheartedly” and notes she found it “so inspiring” to work with nature and watch the brown grass change “right into beautiful blooming floral life.”