Perhaps my New Favorite Garden Toy
Oct 12th, 2008 | By Matt Mayer | Category: Perennial |
OK, most of you are probably thinking I’m going to talk about a tool, but actually I wanted to mention Jerusalem Artichokes aka Sunchokes.
I planted some of these this year for the first time ever, and I’m impressed with them. They grew fantastic, made nice flowers on the top, provided a huge amount of food to the chickens and in the end, gave me the tubers you see below. This bowl is full from half of the section I planted. I created a bed on the south side of my compost pile that is between 3 and 4 ft long. I planted the Sunchokes in double rows within that bed. I didn’t amend the soil or anything. I just dug a trench, put in the tubers and filled it back.
Now, being on the south side of my compost pile probably provided a fair amount of runoff fertilizer, but I’m still amazed at how bountiful they produced. The bowl below is 7 lbs worth. (my scale measures in whole pounds) They don’t seem to produce on the scale of potatoes, but this is still something considering that they are basically plant it and forget it. I just hope we don’t have trouble digesting them like some people say can happen.
Later this fall I’ll harvest the remainder and we’ll see where we end up. I dug these up because I cut back the plants as they were all over the place and I was anxious to see how they did. I hear that if you wait until after there is some frost they sweeten up. We’ll see if that’s true.
Top picture via the Wikipedia page.
What part of the sunchoke provided fodder for your chickens? Does it produce seeds, or was it the greens the chickens liked?
I chopped up the stalks and feed them to the chickens. They appear to mostly have eaten the leaves, but they also ate the flowers and there were bugs on the leaves that they ate also.
Thanks for the report. I also planted sunchokes this year, I haven’t harvested them yet.
I think I will cut the stalks down this weekend and see how the chickens like them. I am always on the lookout for food plants that come back year after year, and also anything I can easily grow at home to feed the chickens. Ours must have been ten feet tall!
We give the cuttings to the chickens, ducks and geese and they take the leaves, then we take back the stalks and run them through the electric chipper. It’s a wimpy chipper but it loves sunchokes, which, before they dry out, are very pithy and easy to grind up.
Everybody has their favorite stuff. The ducks are especially into snails, though the current batch of chickens outrun them for these. The geese are especially fond of sliced zucchini blimps and dandelions and other broadleaved composites, and the chickens will consume basically all dropped apples that are gathered and dumped over the fence for them. Each apple is given an experimental peck and then left alone for a day, but by the end of the next day it is gone.
Everyone is willing to help clean out a giant-sunflower head, but I’m surprised at how diffident they are about it — like a picky child dealing with watermelon seeds.
risabee
If you eat this first harvest and you don’t digest them well, don’t give up. Try them again after the frost. The low temperatures break down some more of the sugar in them (inulin), so you should tolerate the second harvest better. My parents grew these plants when I was a kid, but I just planted them for the first time this year. It’s been very dry here in middle Tennessee, and my plants are all dried out. I’m hoping, though, that I have some tasty tubers waiting for me under ground.
Definitely wait until the tubers have gotten good and cold. They taste pretty gross before then, but delicious after. I usually cut the stalk down, leaving about a foot above the ground as a marker so I know where they are. Where the ground doesn’t freeze, you can harvest as needed through the winter. Where the ground does freeze, you can harvest some now, leave some to harvest as soon as the ground thaws, or cover with hay bales, and pull out what you need when you need it. Just be sure to wait till they’ve been cold, cold, cold!