Courtney Brooke: Good morning. I wanted to show you something really exciting in my garden.
This is my artichoke patch. I got several artichokes here some different kinds that I’m experimenting with.
I planted them just last year so they’re about a year old. I love growing artichokes. They make these…. their flower is edible. They make that big flower but if you let that thing go to seed it’s this huge purple, bright purple, like almost the color of my pants, lavendery beautiful thing that the insects just really love.
I’ve also been planting the cousin of the artichoke the cardoon, which is less well known for eating the flower buds but more well known for eating the leaves and the stems. So they make a really yummy spring green and I’m excited to be growing these ones. They’ve over wintered here. We did cover them once with a cloth when it got to really cold temperature not quite sure what would have happened if we didn’t, they might have still survived. They’re really hardy and grow really easily.
After they have grown for about a year ..you can see right here…. So you can see this see this is the mama plant here and then it’s made this little baby plant here. It makes a side shoot so they just keep on making more and more of themselves. You can propagate them vegetatively or just let them grow into a patch. They don’t need really high quality soil they can grow in pretty marginal areas and on the edges of things. Then you know in some harder less nutrient dense soil.
So yay for artichokes! It’s one of my favorite perennial landscape plants
Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live.
Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing.
Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between.
Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.
