I used to plant them in my rather cool basement, not realizing they might do better with cold stratification. They grew fine
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Thatās awesome! Sounds like if I direct sow them in February, theyāll likely do okay, then. 
How big did they get for you in the first year? Will they need two or more years to produce their first harvest of excess tubers to eat?
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For me, when planted out as transplants in early spring, they reached full size and yield during the first year.
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@UnicornEmily and @Joseph_Lofthouse do you let your sunchokes grow as they please in a designated area or border them/mow them to keep under control?
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I started out by moving the sunroots to a different part of my garden every year. Now I grow them in a perennial bed (from which they invariably escape, and I have never reclaimed any space where they grew in the past. The only way I have eliminated them involved denying irrigation to the field for an entire growing season (in the desert).
I grow them in one permanent row now, about 6 inches wide, and I maintain a 6 foot wide tilled space on either side of the row. During the growing season, I zig-zag the rototiller through the row, and I pull by hand, so that I maintain about one major plant every 3 feet in the row.
For making seeds, I chop the plants off at about waist height, early in the growing season, so that they send out lots of side shoots.
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My original wild sunroots from Kansas.
The F1 generation
What I currently grow, mostly clones from the best of the F1 and F2 generations. (I only replanted about 15% each year.)
They grow 12 feet tall if I donāt prune them. The piece of floating row cover keeps birds from eating the seeds. These days, I tend to harvest the whole seed head about the time that the petals drop.
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I let my sunchokes grow as they please in a designated area. If any pop up outside of that area, I pull them out and plant them in a spot where I do want them. If I do that directly from one spot to the other, they tend to sulk and kill off the stalk and go dormant until next year. So transplanting isnāt very successful. But I have a trick that often works: if I put the sprouted tuber in the fridge for a week or two, and then pull it out and put it where I want it, itāll often keep growing without sulking and going dormant for an entire year. So thatās what I often do now when I find a sunchoke growing in a pathway, instead of in the bed where itās meant to be!
@Joseph_Lofthouse Ooooh, thatās a clever idea, chopping them down early so that theyāll grow back with more flowers, and therefore more seeds. I had never considered that idea. Iāve just let mine do their thing and then harvested whatever (few) seeds they give me at the end of the season. I get an average of maybe one seed per flower currently.
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Wow, 6 ft wide tilled space on either side eh? I wonder if i dug a 2ft deep trench around em that would do the trick. I just grew sunchokes for the first time in 2025, from garden centre tubers. Put them in the biggest containers i had but they were super thirsty throughout summer so id like to keep em in ground, just as everything else that i grow.
A few weeks ago I planted a couple tubers in untilled ground just to see what will happen. The plants themselves didnt reach much higher than 6-8ft tall and the roots underground kept very close to the base of the plant, so im hoping itll be easier to harvest all of the tubers so they remain under control-ish. I just ripped out a bunch of invasive blackberry so im curious if the sunchokes will effecticely compete with the blackberry root system undergroundā¦ but it is a boggy area in the off season so i assume they will rot.
Brilliant tip about chopping the plants back to produce more flowerheads! Thank you! Im hoping that growing sunchokes from seed this year will give me a better chance at growing a variety that will produce seed reliably, unlike the ones i grew last year that didnt seed at all.
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Wow, those look beautiful! Super cool seeing wild sunchokes and the elongated shape you selected sure seems nice for peeling. I appreciate you sharing pictures!
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Oooh Iāll remember that about replanting them! If i have space in my fridge at the time, that is. Heh.
I like the idea of just letting them grow wild n free in a corner, just tricky deciding exactly where, as my boggy area limits what kind of perennials i can put there. I could harvest the tubers before a first frost and they would probably be less rotten but i really prefer the idea of keeping them in ground for a long time to convert some of the inulin and make em nice and sweet. I found lacto-fermenting the sunchokes was delicious! But keep em whole. The sliced ones get kinda mushy without the skin to protect the flesh inside.
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Errā¦ oops! I forgot that you need multiple varieties to get seed. So no wonder i had seedless flower heads.. duh! 
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If your problem is boggy soil, why not grow your sunchokes in pots? They seem to be highly drought tolerant when well-mulched for me, so the extra drainage isnāt likely to hurt them unless youāre growing them in a desert, which Iām guessing youāre not.
Ha ha, yes, I had seedless flower heads my first year, too! Thatās why I bought a bunch of Joseph Lofthouseās tubers from him my second year ā so I could get seeds. 
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I grew my sunchokes in two pots last year, multiplied my quantity and now have 8 pots planted ready to go i just prefer growing everything in ground for maximum nutrient intake without my need to add any extra input such as manure/compost tea/other natural fertilizers, along with extra watering needed. They were droopy every few days so i wouldnāt call them drought tolerant at allā¦ atleast not in the pots!
Im just experimenting in general with em, see how things go. Ultimately id like to keep a designated spot for em in a corner, im just hesitant with keeping them under control. Once I need to initiate full survival food storage garden mode Iāll happily let them spread, but for now im going to enjoy growing a variety of veg, not just calorie dense crops. 
I like interviewing different people and their prefered methods as a guideline for making my own plans heheh. Very helpful indeed!
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You can bury a bit of the bottom of the pot to help it pull moisture from the ground or have a bunch of pots in a kiddie pool and use the pool as a water reservoir. Put sand or gravel in the pool so itās not just standing water. I think David the Good did it in a video.
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If Iām putting something in a pot, I like to fill the bottom half of the pot with wood chips, so that it can absorb a lot of moisture. Sometimes I also add five or six layers of cardboard to the bottom so that the drainage holes will only let water out if the soil is really waterlogged. 
But . . . even with that as a strategy . . . pots rarely work well for me. They just dry out too quickly, and I suspect having pots that are black-colored doesnāt help because my sun gets so hot ā it might very well bake the roots. Iām trying out putting some tropical plants into pots in my greenhouse this year, because anything that wants consistently moist soil and also high drainage (bananas, why must you be so difficult?! 
) seems like it may do better that way. But I dunno; Iām just experimenting, trying to find something that will work.
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My original domestic variety produces many knobs, making them hard to clean. Highly productive though.
No matter how careful I dig, I leave lots behind. And if I leave dug stalks laying around the garden, they often sprout from attached rhizomes the next year. Maintenance for me consists of constant thinning, so that I get some large roots instead of a huge multitude of small.
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Very interesting! How do you thin them?
Iāve found I donāt mind knobby tubers because I can easily snap off all the knobs while Iām cleaning them, so I essentially just wind up with a lot of small football-shaped tubers. A few big football-shaped tubers might be very convenient, though.
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Oooh thank you for the tips! Iāll try burying my pots in the ground a lil bit.
Gotta love David the Good eh? Good stuff
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I love the idea of putting woodchips in the bottom of the pots! Im definitely going to make use of that next time I plant anything in pots. My pots are all black as well so i wonder if that is also why they dried out so fast. It was surprising to me since i have pretty clay dominant soil so i thought it would retain moisture longer. I had mulched it with an inch or two of woodchips and i didnt amend the soil in any way before planting the tubers.
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