This household of two people who enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables as primary ingredients in our diet produces quite a bit of compostable waste. We generally end up with at least two pailfuls of kitchen waste which are placed into two backyard composters that we've maintained for decades. That compost eventually makes its way into our gardens to enrich the soil and help to produce the floral delights that we anticipate throughout the spring, summer and fall months.

Using yesterday's meal preparations as an example, we had two banana peels and two orange skins from breakfast, along with a teabag and coffee grounds to load into the compost pail. We don't eat lunch, so nothing was added for a mid-day meal, but at dinnertime we ate a Shepherd's Pie and Harvard Beets. I'd also prepared a fruit compote comprised of pear and apple chunks, but since I never peel apples or pears, only the pits went into the compost pail. We usually end up with two kitchen compost pails-full of waste weekly. The kitchen compost pails hold about 7 litres (roughly 3/4 cubic foot) of waste.

I also never peel potatoes, simply scrub the skin and cook them since most of the vitamin C is just under the skin; same with fruit. The beets do get peeled after they've been par-boiled. The onion and garlic peel went into the composter. But throughout the course of the week there are waste products like asparagus stems, the inedible leafy portions of cauliflower, melon husks, broccoli stalks, mandarin orange peels, grape stems and other like waste.

Usually during the course of a winter we experience a few periods of milder weather constituting enough of a thaw so that the contents of the two backyard composters are reduced, giving us room to place additional waste into them. Sometimes it seems iffy, that we may not be enabled to continue placing compost from the kitchen into the backyard composters, but just when it seems we'll be stumped, a spate of warmer weather ensues and the full bins become compacted.

Not so this year. It's the first time we can recall having to dump the kitchen compost contents into a plastic bag to be placed in the garage where it will freeze until such time as the backyard composters once again become sufficiently compacted and reduced in height to enable us to add to them. A minor irritant of this colder-than-normal winter, but quite obviously nothing compared to the folks whose household water pipes have frozen.

Certainly Jack and Jill would appreciate the arrival of more balmy days of spring, to allow them to more fully enjoy the comfort of warmth alongside the opportunity to romp in the out-of-doors. But they will be puzzled at the absence of all that delectable white stuff that they enjoy gorging themselves with.