This post is an anecdote about a shopping incident that snowballed. And, incidentally, how to assemble a whiskey barrel planter, should you happen to have one that has fallen apart.
The setup
Source: Gencraft.com.
Yesterday my wife casually mentioned that artichokes now cost $5 at our local Whole Foods. (Or $4 at our local Safeway.)
Aptly enough, that’s five dollars per choke. Choke being what I did when I heard the price.
That’s roughly twice as expensive as filet mignon, per calorie. For a vegetable where you have to scrape the edible parts off with your front teeth?
An artichoke is just an overgrown thistle. A thistle is a weed. I garden. I grow lots of weeds. I’ll go so far as to say that I’m pretty good at growing weeds.
Ergo, I should grow some artichokes this year. QED.
Several hours and $75 later …
1: Artichokes don’t like my climate, or planting Imperial star artichokes
The first thing I realized is that USDA Zone 7 amounts to artichoke Catch-22.
Artichokes plants don’t want to produce artichokes until they’ve overwintered. You typically plant them one year, and get flower blossoms and artichokes for some number of subsequent years. But artichoke plants don’t want to overwinter in Zone 7, as the winters frequently get cold enough to kill the plant.
This is the gist of the weird ambivalence over whether this plant is an annual or a perennial. In the right climate, it’s a perennial vegetable that produces food (broadly defined) only after its first winter. But in Zone 7, it’s not guaranteed winter-hardy. Absent intervention, many or all that I plant this year will have one-year lifetimes as ornamental greenery. But no flowers, and no food.
You can try to trick a new plant into thinking it has overwintered. Vernalization is the term of art for exposing a plant to a required cold period. In this case, it involves some combination of refrigerating the seeds, refrigerating the seedlings, and/or setting the seedlings out when temperatures remain below 50 F (but above freezing) for a couple of weeks. All of which needed to have been set in motion about two months ago. Even then, you are not guaranteed to get artichokes in the first year of growth.
Or you can buy seeds for the Imperial Star variety of artichoke, which was expressly developed for climates like mine. That’s the theory, anyway. The buzz I heard is that they bear artichokes in 90 days, just as (say) a tomato bears tomatoes. For want of a better term, it’s a first-year-bearing artichoke.
I’d like to say it’ll flower without vernalization, but that’s not true. It’s more like it will do that with greatly reduced vernalization. Something I might yet be able to achieve in this growing season, with the help of a fridge or cooler. I’ve ordered some seeds via Amazon.
Oddly, my local stores only carry Green Globe artichoke seeds. Which can’t really be grown around here. I think. Not without extreme measures, if you want some chance of getting first-year artichokes.
Mid-spring is just the perfect time to get seeds delivered in a timely fashion (/s). So the first $15 went for the seeds, plus express shipping. But hey, at $5 per choke, I only need to grow three artichokes this year to break even.
2: Artichokes don’t like my soil.
So what else is new. Nothing likes my soil. When’s the last time you read a plant description that said “thrives in acidic water-impermeable clay”. Or, “for best results, remove all organic matter from the soil prior to planting.”
My native Virginia red clay is great for making bricks. But not much else.
Artichokes are big plants with a deep tap root. That means my best option is to grow these in planters. Great, big planters, filled with soil more to this plant’s liking.
3: Whiskey barrel planters
Source: Home Depot
This is the point where the task morphed from gardening to home decor. I could use a couple of planters to flank my front door. And artichokes are fairly striking-looking. And if I’m going to plunk a couple of big planters down outside my front door, I know what I want.
I wanted to buy two whiskey-barrel planters. These are the real deal: Oak-stave-and-iron-hoop barrels, produced by a cooper, and used for the production of whiskey. They have a certain gravitas that you just can’t reproduce in plastic. For one thing, they look a half-century old right out of the store. So I can install planters that look like they’ve been there since my house was built.
These barrels cannot, in general, be re-used for making whiskey, so there’s a market for cutting them in half, and selling the half-barrels as planters. It’s just a question of finding them locally at a reasonable price.
Turns out, a lot of hardware stores don’t carry these any more. Nearest I could find, at a reasonable price, at $55 each, at a Home Depot about 12 miles away. The internet told me they had some in stock.
4: Things fall apart
I can’t recall the last time I bought a product that disintegrated before I could even get it to the cash register. Long story short, once the Home Depot guy located a pair of these, and pulled down the pallet they were sitting on, drove it outside on the forklift, it then took three HD employees to separate the stacked pair of barrels. One of the two barrels literally fell to pieces as they were trying to extract it.
I thought this was funny, because barrels are friction-fit. No glue, no nails, no nothing. Just iron bands. When you cut a barrel in half, you totally screw that up. An empty half-barrel has no structural integrity. You should be able to pull it apart with your bare hands. But it’s no big deal, because once you fit all the pieces back together, it’s fine.
The Home Depot guy was mortified. I’m pretty sure he thought I was going to tell them to keep their falling-apart product. I said, just give me all the pieces, and I’ll be fine. It’s now a some-assembly-required product.
He granted me a deep discount on the second barrel. I got the impression he was glad to be rid of it.
5: Some assembly required.
To re-assemble your whiskey half-barrel, you will need:
- A box to hold the barrel bottom one (half-) stave-length off the ground.
- A piece of rope, the stretchier the better.
- A hammer, a pry bar, a steel putty knife, and a piece of rebar or equivalent.
From top to bottom, left to right, above:
- Upper Left: Place the barrel bottom on top of the box, charcoal side down.
- Upper Right: Arrange staves around the bottom as best you can, trying to get the notch in the staves to lock into the rim of the barrel bottom. The steel putty knife is particularly useful here, for prying up staves that sit too low relative to the bottom of the barrel.
- Middle Left: Once you have most of the staves in place, tie a rope around that so that they stay put.
- Middle Right: Drop the iron hoops over the staves, taking care to note that the hoops themselves are narrower on one end than the other. If small nails remain in the hoops, pound those nails out first. At this stage, continue to adjust the staves to fit the bottom and one another.
- Lower Left: Hammer the iron hoops down by going around each hoop, striking blows. (Watch any YouTube video on barrel making to get the gist of this). Continue to adjust staves as needed.
- Lower right: The final product. Note that the top line is slightly uneven, because there’s no way to get the staves back into their original order (without doing a whole lot of work). Make any final adjustments to the staves at this point.
How does one ” ..adjust the staves to fit the bottom and one another”? Move them any which way but loose. It’s an iterative process. The only rules are:
- All staves must be used.
- Each stave’s notch must be seated on the barrel head.
- No huge gaps.
It ain’t gonna be water-tight when you’re done. It should be a little loosey-goosey when finished. Above, the iron bands sit high (tight), above the rust marks left on the staves. I need to hammer the bands back to nearer their original position (looser) before I fill this with dirt. Tap in some new nails to keep them there.
Mañana
.
Conclusion
I haven’t filled these yet, which will be another $25 or so in materials.
All told, I only need to grow 20 artichokes to break even. Surely I’ll be coming ahead on this cost-saving move well before the end of the decade. After that, it’s all gravy.
