Gardening Floyd: Plant a Seed

It's February first and nearly time to start seeds for crops that have a long growing season, need warmer temps for germination, or are just plain difficult to direct seed or get past the flea beetles.  Last year we started Violetta artichokes in January.  They require a very long growing season.  Hopefully they'll winter over and we can pick artichokes this year!  We amused the neighbors because they thought we had planted a row of bull thistles in our front yard.  Artichokes are members of the thistle family.

After having little luck starting healthy stocky transplants indoors we were about to give up.  We lusted after one of these but at $370 that so wasn't going to happen.

So Michael started researching and looking around and came up with this: