By Zoë Bradbury

March 1, 2008

Thirty-odd years ago my parents headed north from San Francisco on Highway 101 and ended up in a little town called Bandon on the southern Oregon coast. What started as a weekend road trip ended with them dropping out of college and buying a short order restaurant.

After six months of serving milkshakes and greasy burgers to the after-church crowd on Sundays, they traded the dumpy little restaurant perched over the Pacific for 40 acres and a run-down farmhouse on Floras Creek.

It was my dad’s idea. My mom cried when she saw the place. They weren’t tears of joy.

The place evolved. With some friends, my mom took a chainsaw to all the interior walls and opened the house up. In the yard she built raised beds, put in a pyramid of strawberries, and got a couple of artichoke divisions from a friend on Short Street.

The garden grew. My sister and I were born. Once we had teeth, we ate artichokes each spring.

When I bought my own house in Portland five years ago, my mom dug into the artichoke bed, pried a few loose, and gave them to me along with some raspberry canes. I turned over all the grass in the backyard and put her plants in the ground — the same genetic stock that had fed me for 25 years.

They divided and grew and chokes shot up each spring like the Statue of Liberty’s torch. I don’t have a clue what the variety is: pointy-leaves tipped with sharp spines, dark green fists, the world’s best vehicle for melted butter.

Last week, I was in Portland packing up my house to move, and I took the shovel to the artichokes again.

I pulled up to my new greenhouse on Floras Creek today with a riot of saw-toothed artichoke divisions in the back of the truck, teased them apart into one-gallon transplant pots, and officially began my first season farming for myself, next door to my mom and sister. It seemed like the perfect thing to do on a leap day.

After our five-year stint up north together, me and the chokes have finally come full circle back to home turf. We’re planning on staying awhile.

Zoë Bradbury is a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow. She lives, writes, and farms on Oregon’s southern coast.