Winter Dreaming

I'm finally feeling halfway human again after the cold from hell knocked out most of last week.  Clearly Mike is next to fall...but in the meantime, I'm thinking about aquaponics.

You see, we had set up a little aquarium, hoping to overwinter the pond plants and keep the cat drinking lots of water at the same time.

It was working great for watering the cat, but the plants didn't do so well.  Apparently a noxious weed in Florida can't even manage to conquer one little Canadian fishtank.  After a couple of months the water hyacinth was a soggy rotting mess.

I'm now planning to redo the whole thing as a baby aquaponic system, which I can probably do with parts around the house.  It has to have some sort of open flowing water though, or the cat won't drink...so I'm thinking I can pipe the water up and have it flow into a little funnel, then disperse through the growing medium and back into the tank, where maybe I can grow one Tilapia for months until I eat it?  There's not much gardening to do outside, so we have to dream where we can here.

Out in the garden I've put the tomato bed to sleep under a blanket of horse manure from the local riding stable.  The New Zealand Spinach finally gave it up to the cold in November after growing faster than we could eat it for the whole warm season. 

The lettuce and mesclun are still hanging on for now.  They aren't growing, but they aren't dying.  Hopefully next year I'll have a cold frame set up for winter kale.  Never really had to think about that before!