Not just your Average Thistle: Globe Artichokes

First picking of Green Globe

This awful spring has produced one big surprise harvest in the garden.  Artichokes.

But, it has taken four years to get to this point.  In the first year we were in France, the lone surviving plant from the initial handful grown from seed produced a single aphid and ant infested head which we shared.  It was small and not worth the bother.  The plant promptly succumbed to the cold or the damp or both over the winter and never re-appeared.