Help! Artichoke advice needed

Mr artichoke and sons

 I'm notoriously bad at knowing when to pick fruit and vegies, and tend to leave it that little bit too long.  I have my first globe artichoke here.  I blogged about it earlier in the week but it seems to have progressed quite a lot since then and now has two tiny hangeronerers on each side.   My question is: is this artichoke ready for the picking or should I leave it a bit longer.  Part of me says 'pick it!', the other bit of me (and I suspect it's the dominant 'leave it' part) says 'don't be a fool, it's only young'.  Does anyone have any suggestions? Advice?

Oh and any cooking suggestions while you're at it?

mf of an artichoke plant

artichoke no longer choking

My artichoke is finally doing something other than leaves!

I have two artichoke plants.  I bought one, and once I was satisfied that I was unlikely to kill it, I purchased another.  I knew they grew quite tall, so I planted them both at the southern end of two different garden beds, but I wasn't expecting them to cover over a meter in width each with their massive green fronds. Nor did I expect the plants to take so long to produce a flower (it's been about 8 months).  The photo above is of the original plant. The other is still quite small, strangely enough.

I bought them both from the lovely woman at Salamanca markets - the one that I waxed lyrical about a couple of posts ago.  I spoke to her about what I wanted it for, and she advised me to get the green artichoke.  Now, call me stupid, but I reckon I might have accidently received the purple one....


My posts have dropped off lately, unfortunately.  This is partly because of a bad back and mostly because the only way to get images of my garden onto this blog at the moment is to take a photo with my iPhone, post it to Twitter, drag the photo off twitter onto my desktop and then post the image.  Obviously, I'm not going to do that with the 50-odd enthusiastically snapped garden photos currently on my phone.  Some parting wise words: don't accidently bin iPhoto from your mac and don't expect a digital camera to survive a pond experience...