Hello, steemians, and welcome to Amber's yooper blog!
Apparently I forgot about several pictures that I took last week that were of the greenhouse and the pond fish, so I guess I have something to write a post about today.
First, the greenhouse. This is what the inside of the greenhouse looks like now, it will probably stay this way for the winter, except I might put more stuff in there to get it out of the weather, such as the bicycles. I left the tomato pots in place up against the front wall of the greenhouse. There's no reason to move them because that's where they'll be next spring when I start planting again. I left the mint plants out in the greenhouse, the catnip and the wild mint of unknown type. I also brought in the containers with carrots in them, although they probably got frozen anyway because of the cold nights we've been having.
I think this was the last sunny day that we had, the 7th of November. It's been mostly overcast every day since then.
Anyway, these are the catnip plants and a couple of the last pepper plants in containers that I had brought into the greenhouse. They're frozen well up now, the poor things. As you can see, the greenhouse becomes a handy place to store things for the winter.
This is a dry stacked cement block half wall that I put together and painted black on the side facing south. The black paint helps the blocks gather heat when the sun is shining, helping to heat the greenhouse, and storing some of the heat into the night. It's not very effective in the winter, especially when there's long periods of overcast sky like we typically have in the winter here. It will be more useful in the spring when I want to start using the greenhouse again. That's my sage plant on top of the wall. I brought it into the basement for the winter so that it wouldn't freeze and die.
Speaking of the basement, every year we drain our outdoor pond and bring the pond fish into the basement for the winter. If we were to leave them in the pond for the winter, they would all die, because the pond is not deep enough to keep from freezing solid in the winter. In the past, we've used my 100 gallon watering trough to keep them in for the winter, but this year I had access to a 70 gallon aquarium, so we decided to put the fish in that for the winter. I have 2 florescent shop light fixtures that are on a timer to give the fish light during the day, otherwise it would be dark where they are, which would be bad for them. I have since put a larger filter on the left side of the tank to get better filtering of the water, and more oxygen into the water. I've also taken sever of the smaller ones out of this tank and put them in a separate 40 gallon tank. They need a lot of water to stay healthy.
