Update on the Make Do Mansion...

You may have noticed the lack of the food pantry haul this weekend - it's not late. I woke Saturday morning in pain, and quickly decided that while  I could have {in theory} made the food pantry, doing so wouldn't have been practical at all given my pain status and the weather report. Since we had enough to coast on from previous weeks, I decided to spend my limited energy doing other errands we needed to get done that day.

So for the past several days, I've been working on the chicken coop and garden. So far this week I have accomplished:

• Planting seed potatoes in our tire potato planters. They are a bit late, but we'll see how they do. Our other potatoes planted earlier in the year from compost are doing wonderfully with all the rain we've had. 
• Weedeating{in lieu of mowing since we don't own a mower} the back yard, in prep for gardening and for snake prevention
• Sprayed roundup that I found in the shed along the fence into the alley, in hopes of killing the tall weeds growing there {it hasn't worked yet}
• Drawing up plans for the eventual backyard garden to homestead conversion. I now have a clear outline of what goes where and what we need to get. 
• Decided to rip out the overgrown hedge in front of our home, to be replaced with either a medicinal plant area or possibly a berry hedge.
• Researched other crops to add to our urban homestead, including aquaponics {turned out to be too warm here for that}, rabbits {I want & great meat option, but dd refuses to eat}, and pygmy goats {still thinking on this one}. 
• Created a budget for the coop project, as well as a list of materials needed.
• Worked out how to cover most of the cost of Hardware cloth for the coop thanks to trading in a few things on Amazon, and how to cover most of the cost of Chicken wire for the run thanks to a Lowes gift card from Shopkick. 
• Sold a ton of excess fabric from my fabric stash {that honestly I was never going to use}, which will go to fund the replacement windows due to the recent hail storm. 
• Worked out a budget that will {hopefully} get us fully caught up on the property taxes by September or so.