On our first trip to the Greek island of Karpathos where we now make our home, a stranger in the street approached us and handed us two artichokes he had just picked. He wished us Godspeed in our travels and thus we were introduced to this wild vegetable.

As luck would have it, our back yard is filled with these wild plants, wonderfully thriving artichokes! We hadn‘t noticed any of the strange vegetable back there the first time we looked at the property. The second time we saw the house, some four months later, was when we moved in. By then the back yard was a carpet of deep purple puff balls about the size of a fist - ignored artichokes nobody had picked. The stalks were over a foot high and bone dry, about fifty strong. A very curious sight.

All the year‘s rain falls on 40 or 50 winter days here and rivers form on the sidewalks and down the steps. Early in the year, deep green artichoke leaves show up and the vegetable core becomes evident in April or May. Most plants have just one large artichoke, though some plants sport two smallish ones. Both the stalks and the artichokes themselves are prickly. I would recommend wearing gloves unless you grow the "bulb type" of the vegetable (with no prickers).

In May or June we can (gingerly) harvest this wild crop of ours. At the outset, we were quite unsure what to do with the bowls of raw artichokes we‘d collected. Our limited experience in eating this vegetables meant a pizza topping. Most of our first year‘s crop landed in salads. We weren‘t very creative.

Artichoke training

One spring day a kindly neighbor invited me into her kitchen for artichoke school. She showed me how to rub the freshly cut and peeled heads with a lemon so they wouldn‘t brown. (Vinegar also works.) She showed me a one-pot vegetable dish - potatoes, broad beans and artichokes. The other important point, she told me, was to add generous amounts of sea salt and olive oil.

Greece has poor soil conditions due to erosion and a shortage of trees, so the deep roots of artichoke plants play an important role in holding in the earth on hillsides. If you‘re wondering how strongly they are rooted, I can tell you I once bent garden shears trying to cut an artichoke plant. Our artichokes prosper even though our garden is chock full of rocks and stones, far too many to remove. With little intervention on our part, our crop increases year-by-year. We peel and blanch every one and this spring we expect we‘ll have over 200. We have completely given up on those artichoke salads, due to the over-abundance of lettuce, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions and cucumbers in our garden.

The artichoke‘s edible parts include the whitish bottoms of the bracts, the heart cleaned of the fuzz and the interior of the stem. Our favorite dish is artichokes simmered with lamb, carrots and onions, but half our yield of the wild vegetable ends up in the freezer. Though we‘re wild about artichokes, two people can consume only so many.

There‘s a natural routine for this work. The best time to harvest is when the tops are just beginning to open and one should watch out for any stems with obvious worm holes. We split the work so we collect and prepare about 40 artichokes per week during the season.

And, the way expats confront any new challenge, we simply learn as we go.

Roberta Beach Jacobson is an American freelancer who left Chicagoland in 1974 on a European vacation and never went back. She makes her home on a remote Greek island, with publishing credits that include Travel Smart, Transitions Abroad and International Living.

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