Gratuitous Outdoor Posting (TM) - Garden Division

Our pal Chan the Bookish Gardener has a nice column up over at Saucy about starting seeds indoors. (Her basement greenhouse -no illicit crop jokes, please- sounds an awful lot like mine. Except I need to get a timer - when I turn off the lights and try to make my way out of my workshop in the gloom, I almost invariably whack my shins on something.)

I actually wound up not starting anything indoors this year. Instead, I am taking a year to see what the perennial garden can do on its own. There certainly were fists-full of seeds spreading about last fall, so hopefully we'll get some good returns this spring.

Indeed, I'm encountering a problem I hadn't anticipated - lots of seedlings are starting to spring up, but I haven't the faintest idea which ones are the lovely, desirable progeny of my flowers and which ones are the rat-bastard weedlings seeking to overrun the beds in their foul hordes. The only thing I can do is hold off yanking them until I can be certain which are friendlies and which are hostiles.

As for the returning class, the iris, columbine, shasta daisies and hollyhock are already going great guns in terms of new growth. The peonies, Russian sage, salvia, Buddleia, black eye susans, clematis and blackberry lily are all just starting to come on too. Still no sign of the return of the purple and white coneflower, butterfly weed and joe pye weed. I have to restrain myself from worrying about them - they're weeds, fer cryin' out loud! You can't kill them even if you try!

UPDATE: I may have asked this before, but does anybody out there have any experience growing artichoke plants? I'm toying with the idea of giving it a try, but if they're sulky and problematic, I don't want to bother.

UPDATE DEUX: Here's what the folks at Monticello have to say about growing arties in Virginia, which is where I saw my first plant. (It's an unearthly prehistoric-looking thing, like a cross between a thistle and a Venus flytrap.) A little further digging indicates that some varieties are being developed for use here. But it seems like a lot of fuss and bother and commenter Dave, reporting from my neck of the woods, is pessimistic about the results. Eh.