I wanted some artichokes for my garden, and there’s no particularly good place to buy these locally. Perhaps there are a couple of fellow gardeners to ask, but instead I decided to try growing them from seed. I was placing an order with Baker Creek in the US anyway, so I just added on some of all the artichokes they had in their listings at the time:
Except that winter here is a little wet, I have a pretty good climate for growing artichokes as a perennial. Generally by partly covering the artichoke to protect from direct rain, it will keep dry enough to survive the winter.
I read two important things about growing artichokes from seed. The first is the genetics are variable, so you should plant several with the intention of selecting the best ones. The other was they don’t normally produce flowers (artichokes) the first year, but you can increase the chances of this by exposing the young plants to a period of cold, which I tried to do. In fact we had very strange weather this spring, so not only did the young plants get exposed to cold, they got exposed to all extremes of weather; hot, dry, wet and cold. They also stayed in rootbound pots too long, because the weather wasn’t cooperating enough to let me plant them out.
Most of my garden neighbors artichoke plants start producing by early summer, but for some reason mine didn’t start blooming until the solstice. I’m sorry, except for the green globes, I didn’t keep track of which picture was of which variety, but if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to go back and match them up.
Here are two of the green globe plants:
What was kind of interesting, as well as the plants doing well, the plants that didn’t do well. For example here is a plant that’s doing fine:
but here’s a plant of about the same size and of the same variety sitting right next to it:
This one has it’s own ecosystem on it. First it’s covered with aphids, but also ladybugs and some other insects, which are eating the aphids.
As far as I know, this is the only plant in my garden at the moment with aphids, and certainly none of the other artichokes have them. I wonder what it is about it that’s so attractive to them?
Finally a number of the plants never got much larger than this, which is about 5 cm off the ground.
Awesome artichokes!
Hi Deb, thanks for the nice comment!