"Whatever Wednesday" - Mystery Plant Edition

Hello and Welcome!

Do you remember last week when we took a scenic tour and discovered Garbanzo Bean (aka Chickpeas) fields?  Well just this week an article appeared in our local paper about this crop and how it's really taken off in this area. - How funny is that that after we figured out what the crop was on our own there would be an article published about that very same crop.

Perhaps that will happen again with today's Mystery plant.

 I'm sharing some photo's of a "Mystery Plant" that I happened upon yesterday.
I was driving by the school Coleen attends when I noticed a very large Thistlelike plant in the garden at the front of the school.  I knew I just had to walk on down and explore this plant further and that's just what I did.

See if you can figure out (by the end of the post) what type of a plant this is.

This is bascially what I saw as I drove past. (No I didn't take a photo out the window while driving)...I jsut shot this view so you could see what I saw and why I thought that these plants were giant Thistles of some sort.



















On closer inspection of the plant I found these wonderful blooms and also discovered that the Bee's seemed very attracted to this plant.  Here's one coming in now for a landing.

From this next view you can see that there were plenty of pollen happy bee's enjoying these unusual purple blooms.

Is this plant starting to look familiar to any of you?  Keep reading if you still haven't figured out what this plant is.

This next shot shows the plant before it's bloomed.  I think this may just give it away.

Have you ever seen anything like this in your grocery store?  If not you might want to check out this link  to discover that this plant is none other then an...........

ARTICHOKE!