Winter's really here

Here's how I know: It's not because my hands and feet actually hurt from the cold as I brushed off the car yesterday. It's not because the air in my apartment is so dry from the heating that you could make fruit leather. It's not the snow on the lawns, roofs and sidewalks, or the 2 1/2 hours of white-knuckle driving on more or less pure sheet ice that took me 35 miles on Wednesday.

It's the fact that yesterday I had to put a banana peel in the garbage.

This is a big, dark day for me every year: The day when all the compost bins are not only full to the brim but frozen solid, and even the 5-gallon bucket that is my way station to the bins is a chock-full block of ice (well, icy vegetable scraps and coffee grounds). So there I was, standing with a banana peel in my hand, and no place to compost it until spring.

It just pains me. Perfectly good biomass that's going to go to a landfill. I am miserly with biomass. I don't want anything leaving my garden that could in the long run help my soil and my plants.

Yes, I know I should have a worm bin. But I haven't figured out a place to do that. My kitchen is tiny. My basement is four flights of stairs down, and my experience of keeping worms there was that I forgot all about them and they died. It's the same reason that I have learned to start seeds in the guest room--there's lots more space in the basement, but it's a remote outer province, like Siberia, that slips my mind unless I'm doing laundry. Nothing that requires my attention will survive down there.

So from December to roughly March I must steel myself to send apple cores, banana peels, coffee grounds, strange organisms found in the depths of the crisper and other yummy microorganism fodder off to the Dumpster.

I use all the plant matter I can. I leave most of my leaves where they fall as mulch. I collect all the leaves from the paths and the lawn, and as much as I can reach from my neighbors' yards. Nothing that might decay escapes the compost bin during the growing season. But winter in Chicago sends a lot of things into hiding, including the microbes, fungi, arthropods and insects that make the compost magic. They die off or hunker down until it's warm enough for them to work.

One of the things I have high hopes for is the change in law that makes commercial food composting legal in Illinois. We're a long way from implementation, but someday, I hope, food scraps will be collected from homes, supermarkets and restaurants for commercial composting. Those operations use huge, long piles called windrows that are regularly turned with front-loaders, and they get hot enough to keep the bugs and critters working all winter long. So if that ever happens, I'll have something constructive to do with a banana peel, even in the middle of winter.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

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