The purple threads call the bees as cardoons start to flower. 🌸🐝 Thistles lie at the center of life on the farm. Like so many of the plants that are important to us, The Hawthorn and the Locust to name a few, they are covered in spines. Initially, this can be offensive, but we’ve come to associate them with all the ways they provide beauty, flavor and healing. Thorns are part of this experience. 🦔 As they rise from the soil, they take on branching architectural forms. The nooks presented by these angles and shapes are possible homes for insects and birds in need. The nectar of their purple flowers is one of the most important food sources for migrating butterflies and other pollinators. Wild bees flock to them as the sun sets on the garden. After the plants flower their seeds take flight like parachutes on fluffy calyx tissue that birds use to build pillowy nests for their young. As the thistles rise into the air to flower their deep taproots are decompacting soil and scavenging the earth for nutrients. In winter, their spires decompose in place, trampled by the snow and the hoofs of animals, feeding the network of microorganisms beneath the soil and release their scavenged nutrients to the other plants around them. 🦗🦎🦇🐣 Fukuoka recommended seeding thistles that have uses for humans into areas where more wild thistles are growing. We chose to do this with milk thistle and cardoons when we first arrived on this site and we now have an abundant supply of food and medicine from both. The cardoons is a more primitive and resilient relation of the artichoke. One eats the fluted stalks in late winter and early spring before the rest of the garden is producing. It is one of winters transcendent foods and can be prepared in a myriad ways, but we prefer them simply blanched and dressed with anchovies. Instead of eating its flower head as one does with an artichoke, the threads can be used to rennet cheese. They are also one of the best way to bring a bitter component to a vermouth or aromatized wine. All of this, from a plant that requires no work to grow, and provides all environmental benefits conveyed by all thistles. 🌸✨ Continued in comments.