Springtime in Ohio offers gardening opportunities

Spring in Ohio is quite special. It is no wonder that I grew homesick for Ohio's seasons when I was away in places like Alaska and Oklahoma.

The worst was Oceanside, Calif., during my youth where I stayed four months with my grandparents. Despite the novelty of gathering fallen avocados beneath a large tree, my sisters and I constantly begged our mother to take us back to Ohio. Not only was there no snow, but it rained just once the whole time! Upon our return, Ohio was soon teeming with life and beauty.

Majestic sized trees showered the air with the scent of blossoms of every size and color. I immediately planted a vegetable garden in our backyard with Wando peas. I sowed the seeds, which looked exactly like dried peas, into the cold earth.

Much to my dismay, a good inch of snow fell a few days later. However, two weeks after that I saw pea plants sprouting from the row I had planted. In disbelief, I pulled one out and saw the halves of the seed stuck on each side of the root. Slowly the excitement of their living overcame my astonishment. When it comes to gardening, peas are probably the easiest vegetable to grow from seed.

With the aftermath of the recent March snowfall on most people's minds, has anyone paused to reflect on the adage that March comes in like a lion, but goes out like a lamb? Come the first day of spring on March 19, gardeners can begin exercising their green thumbs by planting a row or two of garden peas. Peas can be sown as soon as the soil thaws enough to be tilled. Choose areas with good drainage. They prefer cool weather and are not bothered by a chance April snow. If additional sowings are made every two weeks throughout spring, peas can be harvested from April to early summer.

Originally from England, a pea was known as a pise and the plural form of a pise was pisan. Today, the new singular of a pise is pea and the plural of a pise is peas rather than pisan.

Garden peas are of two types -- edible-podded types known as Sugar Snap Peas and Snow Peas are eaten pod and all, and nonedible-podded types known as Spring or English peas are first shelled and then either eaten fresh, cooked, or frozen immediately before their sugars turn to starch.

Begin harvesting your peas as soon as the pods are filled out enough to eat. If you let the pods grow too large, they become hard and lose their high sugar content. I can't begin to guess what peas will be called a hundred years from now what with genetic engineering, but right now all pea varieties are open-pollinated. None are hybrids.

Peas must be provided with support such as a trellis or fence, otherwise the pea pods lay on the wet ground and soon rot. Peas also benefit from inoculation, which means shaking your seeds in a bag containing a nitrogen-fixing bacteria before sowing them. Most hardware stores carry small bags of innoculant for sale to gardeners. Pests to keep watch for are the pea aphid and pea weevil. Botanical insecticides can control these pests without harmful chemicals. To learn more about environmentally responsible insecticides, fungicides, and fertilizers, visit www.GardensAlive.com.

Planting peas in late March after being cooped-up all winter is exhilarating. Instinctively, I begin looking around my flower borders for tulips and daffodil shoots poking forward from the earth. After a few good whiffs of fresh air, it dawns on me that spring is in the air. Looking up, Red Maples are throwing out hundreds of miniature blossoms. The Red Maple blossoms are so small that many people mistake them for leaf buds until an orchard bee arrives to feast upon them.

Last year I experienced a rare bonus in planting my garden when I unearthed a small arrowhead for the first time in my life. Here I was, a little more than 200 years after the Native-Americans were chased out of their country by Yankee muzzle-loaders holding an artifact fashioned by the hand of someone long before me.

Either that, or for a small flat rock, it was a pretty good likeness of an arrowhead.

"It's an arrowhead alright," my friend from Sandusky assured me. "I've found three of my own so far."

I asked him if he could identify the nation whose member had fashioned it, but he couldn't. Still curious, I eventually phoned around to the Oberlin Heritage Center, the Lorain County Historical Society, the Erie County Historical Society, a history professor at LCCC, and an arrowhead collector in Bellevue. No one could shed light on the tribe of that arrowhead's maker. In fact, nobody could tell me the names of the Native-American nations that lived here in Lorain County.

As I plant my peas again this year, I'll be wondering about that arrowhead maker and his people. What did they plant first to start off spring? They didn't have English peas, but they cultivated many vegetables long unknown to Europeans such as potatoes, corn, kidney and lima beans, squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, and peanuts.

I do remember reading that their gardening methods and agriculture saved the lives of the pilgrims, and yet I know so little about them or their methods. I'll have a hard time keeping my thoughts on my garden while that arrowhead maker remains a mystery.