It may be March, but as far as Ithaca is concerned, we still have another month and a half of winter in front of us — I’m going crazy. After all, there really isn’t any in-season fruit. Sure, Wegmans may try to convince us with price breaks that navel oranges from the sunnier parts of the country are rolling to idling 18 wheelers in what could only be described as a bumper crop.

March is the time of year for crates of clementines that disappear quickly at first, but soon reach a stable, albeit slightly moldy, equilibrium of a few less-choice samples. A glance into the average refrigerator today turns up some limp carrots and celery stalks and perhaps a sad-looking head of iceberg lettuce.

Frankly, even though the sun may be shining a bit longer every day, we have reached the stygian depths of winter in terms of produce.

True, you can still find apples at the supermarket. Generally, they’ve been imported from Washington State and have been in storage for a couple of months; even though apples admittedly have a long shelf life, the tastiest pomes come from right down the road and not thousands of miles away. After all, consider the amount of energy that went into storing each apple in a climate-controlled environment, shipping it across the country just to make it into your mouth — when you bite into that apple, you also bite into one of the reasons that the U.S. has such a titanic carbon footprint.

I am especially leery of the completely out-of-season produce that I find now. Stickers label pears and peaches as products of Chile; blackberries and raspberries came from Mexico. These are extremely perishable fruits, so they are often picked on the green side of ripeness in order to make the shipment with more than a truckload of fermenting goo.

As a result, even though those Mexican blackberries glisten like polished ebony and have the heft of small children, they often don’t taste anywhere near as good as the little mooshy berries to be found at midsummer . Oh, and unless you’re buying organic produce (at roughly twice the price), that foreign fruit could be loaded with everything from pesticides to human feces. Green onions, anybody?

Years ago, farmers made their houses with a primitive kind of cold storage known colloquially as the “root cellar.” These unheated, 50-something degree basement rooms were the produce equivalent of the pantry. Here, squash, potatoes, apples and onions from the fall harvest lay stockpiled for later use. Things like yams and butternut squash, both extremely tasty and high in nutritive content, could be pulled out and used ad hoc for the rest of the winter.

I read a New York Times article last November that detailed a small-scale revival of the root cellar, and although I would advise against attempting to squirrel away cabbage and turnips in a closet in Dickson, perhaps it would be possible to put some of the chilly attics in Collegetown to good use, so that we can avoid eating out-of-state apples in the winter.

Fortunately, there is a reward for making it through the winter — strawberries, blueberries and raspberries appear in June, asparagus several weeks before and spinach, if started properly indoors, around the same time.

The Ithaca Farmers’ Market springs to life with zucchinis and tomatoes, peaches and cherries during the summer; the Dilmun Hill student farm brings in bushels of organics, and the Cornell Orchards offer their own early fruits. It is almost tragic, then, that Cornell students generally do not get to experience the bulk of the fresh produce season in Ithaca; it all happens during the summertime! But never fear: Apple season comes again in the early fall, along with plums, pears and pumpkins.

Such succulent seasonal fruit are the stuff of a foodie’s dream. Herein lies the rub — I love these delicious fruits so much that I really miss them when they’re not around. Sometime in early March, I go a bit crazy and start loading up on overripe bananas and Italian kiwi fruit, because even though they aren’t in season, I just can’t seem to kick my ripened-plant-ovary habit.