Tips for growing sunchokes

Hi, y’all! I thought it would be nice to have a thread about sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus, a.k.a. Jerusalem artichoke, which is clearly a brilliant and not at all a confusing name for a North American sunflower :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:).

This is my third year growing them, and I have found them a terrific crop for my climate: Utah, zone 7b cool wet winters, very hot and arid summers.

Here are my experiences so far, in case this interests you.

In general, I find sunchokes to be vigorous and drought tolerant. They would probably do great dry-farmed in most climates; in my climate, with 95-100 degree temperatures with little to no rainfall for five months, they do great with deep wood chip mulch and being watered every two weeks. They start to wilt a bit and look complainy if I forget to water them for a whole month, but they will generally recover just fine; they just won’t produce quite as much of a harvest if I don’t water them twice a month.

They’re vigorous enough that I can plant a tuber an entire foot down, covered in deep wood chip mulch, and it’ll grow up through it just fine. Sometimes this can be a bit of a nuisance if I decided to move my sunchoke patch and seem to have missed a few small tubers somewhere. (Laugh.) But it’s easy enough to remove unwanted sunchokes – when you find a sprout, you follow it down to the tuber and pull it out and put it somewhere you want instead.

Just keep in mind that you’ll pay a cost if you move them while they’re actively growing: the top will die off, and it’ll go dormant until next spring. So if you see a sunchoke sprout in the wrong spot in April and dig it up and put it somewhere else, you won’t see it sprout again until next April. I find that a bit of a bummer.

Sunchokes are supposed to be a little allelopathic, like other sunflowers. I’ve grown them next to peach and fig trees, both of which seemed to be unbothered by them.

I think they may have an allelopathic effect on morning glories, because bindweed seems to be less prevalent near them. Works for me! :tada: They may also discourage cucurbits and brassicas from sprouting; I haven’t seen much germination of those seeds planted next to sunchokes yet. But that may just be because I water the sunchokes so infrequently.

I’ve heard legumes are immune to sunflower allelopathy, and I’ve grown vigorous peas right next to sunchokes before. Sunchokes make a decent living trellis for peas. The main problem is that peas sprout in January/February and sunchokes sprout in March/April, so the sunchokes aren’t tall enough to serve as trellises by the time the peas need them. They’d be excellent trellises for my August-sown peas, but my August-sown peas keep growing all winter, so they’d get in the way of harvesting the sunchoke tubers. I’m thinking sunchokes might be a good trellis for drought tolerant summer legumes, such as cowpeas.

Don’t rush to harvest sunchokes. If you’re still harvesting squashes, the sunchokes are several months away from being ready. Most of the tubers form in late fall, at least in my climate. If I dug them up in September, there would be nothing. Late November might be okay, but I generally won’t touch them until early December, at the earliest. I usually wait until Christmas. There’ll usually be about twelve tubers per plant around Christmas.

There’s another benefit to waiting that long, which is that sunchokes taste best in the winter. They’re sweeter. They’re also way more digestible.

Sunchokes are chock full of inulin, a powerful fiber. This is awesome, unless you eat too much. If you’re not used to eating inulin all the time, do not eat three at one sitting. Eat one tiny tuber, or even half a tuber. Do that every day for a week. Then you can start eating twice as much. If you are used to eating inulin every day – I am, because it’s a fabulous food that tastes exactly like sugar but is actually pure fiber – then eat as many sunchokes as you feel like.

Sunchokes taste very similar to potatoes; the main difference is that they are slightly sweet. There’s a little bit of a difference in flavor other than that, which I think comes from the skin, because that slight flavor is noticeable in my purple sunchokes and not in my white ones. It’s not very strong, and to me it tastes fine. If you don’t like that flavor, peel them or grow white sunchokes.

Sunchokes have a very poor shelf life. You can’t store them dry at room temperature, unlike potatoes or sweet potatoes. You can harvest loads, stick them in a sealed bag, and then stick that bag in the fridge, though. If you do that, they’ll probably be fine for a few months. If your soil freezes solid during the winter, I would probably recommend doing that. If your soil is often soft during the winter (like mine is), I recommend just wandering outside and pulling up a few whenever you want to eat some.

You can start sunchokes from whole tubers, or even little chunks of tubers that have at least one eye. I was delighted to discover the latter works fine. However, the larger the tuber (or chunk of one) you plant, the larger your harvest will be at the end of the season. So I tend to eat the small ones and replant the large ones. It seems to be a better investment.

I recommend you pick varieties that are easy to clean. I have tried Beaver Valley Purple, Mammoth White, and the Joseph Lofthouse landrace. Mammoth White is very productive, but the tubers are very knobby and a bit of a pain to clean mud out of. Beaver Valley Purple and the Joseph Lofthouse landrace phenotypes all produce tubers that are more of a single bulge, with a few extra bulges on the ends of the biggest that you can easily break off and clean separately. They all grow well in my climate, and they all flower and can produce seeds.

Grown in my climate with very little watering, Mammoth White and Beaver Valley Purple both flower in August, and the Joseph Lofthouse landrace all flowers in September. I can generally harvest finished seeds from them all in late October or early November.

Sunchokes do not seem to be very productive about growing seeds. If I’m lucky, I can find seven seeds in one flower. It’s more common for me to find zero seeds (that’s about half the flowers) or one or two seeds (most of the rest). This may be a pollination issue, it may be a drought issue, it may be birds eating the seeds, or it may just be that sunchokes aren’t very productive at making seeds. I will generally get about 10-15 seeds from the biggest plants that have flowered a lot, about 1-5 seeds from any medium-sized plant with a few flowers, and zero seeds from the rest (which is about half the plants).

As a side note, both Beaver Valley Purple and Mammoth White seem to do better in extreme heat than the Joseph Lofthouse landrace, but the Joseph Lofthouse landrace seems to sprout earlier before the last frost and stay green longer after the first frost, so his landrace is probably ideal for a climate with cooler summers and a shorter growing season than mine. Which would make sense, since his climate fits that description. :wink:

I hope those tips are helpful! If anyone else has any tips they’d like to add, feel free! I imagine growing sunchokes can be different in every climate. :seedling:

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In their natural state, sunroots grow in soil just drier than where cattails live. They died out when I stopped watering a field they grew in.

My fields are heavily populated with sunroots, because I moved them from place to place over the years, and I haven’t been able to eliminate them. These days, I treat them as a perennial.

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In one garden, we grow them with a barrier. They still escape at the edges, but there’s a foot path around the patch, so we regularly clear that path. It keeps the sunchokes in places. I’ve sometimes found sunchokes in other beds in that garden, probably from scraps. I haven’t had problems pulling them out of the ground when I don’t like where they are. The stem makes it easy because of the rigidity. If the soil is loose enough I just pull the whole thing.

At another garden, we let them loose. The voles eat the roots and unless I actively plant new ones out, they seem to end up eating them all. That garden seems otherwise perfect conditions for the plant and they get very tall. Humid and fertile soil.

I’ve planted sunchokes at a third site now with no barrier. I intend to let them grow more wild there. I don’t see voles yet and the soil is much drier.

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I consider sunchokes a security policy. In times of turmoil they are always present in a ground and even if anyone takes all visible food from you, they will probably have no idea that food is under their feet in a form of sunchoke tubers :wink:
I am very surprised with what Joseph says, that they need wet soil. In my place, in very dry, pure sand soil they survive with no inputs or work. I never plant them in garden beds, I plant them as windbreaks around the gardens, on path edges, under the fence, etc. They are never watered, fertilized or weeded.
I used to harvest them and was was storing them for months in a root cellar, in buckets with sand. They were lasting till spring or longer, but usually somewhere in May they stared to grow shoots even in full darkness.
I no longer store them - when I need them, I dig them out in places where they grow, any time of the year. It is possible even in the middle of winter in my sandy soil, although it requires some work.
I have two varieties - Albik (white) and Rubik (purple), both are quite knobby but since the harvest of sunchokes is always plentiful, I simply cut knobs off, and feed my compost with scraps.
In Korean Natural Farming books I have found information that if you boil the whole plants for couple of hours, you can get pretty good insecticide that can be used for aphids and other pests but I was unable to verify that.
In terms of eating sunchokes, I like to fermant them, like cucumbers, it allows to decrease levels of inulin significantly. Other than that, I make sunchoke soups. I do not eat them neither boiled nor in a form of chips, because tat would surely result in excessive greenhouse gas emissions, you know what I mean :slight_smile:

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I planted Joseph’s sunchokes several years ago and they grew well. I decided to leave them over winter to establish a stronger patch, but they didn’t come back up the next spring. I dug around and found little bits of peel with teeth marks was all that was left, voles I suppose. Birds were interested in the seed heads, but I wasn’t able to collect any for myself.

There are lots of wild ones here, growing along roadsides and on the high riverbanks. The don’t appear to need moist soil from what I can see. The wild ones I transplanted into my patch were also eaten by the voles. I guess the wild ones are just too numerous for the voles to eat them all.

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If they do well in very moist soil and also very dry soil, that’s great!

There are other plants that are a lot more finicky (bananas rot if their soil is too wet and wither if their soil is too dry, insisting on a perfect balance which I have found hard to achieve, grumble grumble :stuck_out_tongue:), so if sunchokes can thrive in many different soil conditions, that makes them pretty awesome as a survival staple.

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Thanks Emily, that was really thorough! Yesterday some friends dug their sunchokes and noticed that where they’b been planted in mostly compost (in bags) , the plants were healthy and giant but hardly any roots . When planted in soil (in bags) the harvest was plentiful.

Interesting! Has anyone else seen something like that happen?

Hi I was watching YouTube on sunchoke they mentioned something that might be interesting they were talking about how you need to boil them for 25 minutes and it makes it more humanly friendly in other words they it changes their two more tolerable type food

Yeah, cooking them for a long time also breaks down the inulin.

I just fry 'em. They taste like french fries, only better. :wink:

When you boil any veggie rich in inulin, it dissolves in water (it is water soluble). So if you get rid of that water it is fine, worse if you make a soup. Boiling water temperature is a bit too low to break down inulin molecules into simpler sugars. On the other hand, when you fry or bake, temperature is sufficient, but you have to do it for quite long. Possibly VERY long cooking with changing water can be also good, but for me that’s just waste of energy. These are just observations I have mede, not definite answers :slight_smile:

I generally microwave my sunchokes for a few minutes, until they’re soft, and then eat them like baked potatoes.

That probably keeps most of the inulin intact, and that is something I don’t mind. Inulin is very good for your digestive system as long as you’re used to it. (If you’re not used to it, you’ll need to work up to it. But once you are used to it, most gut bacteria will be able to handle lots of inulin all the time with no trouble.)

Those things are seriously invasive.

I grow in an allotment setting. My direct neighbor grew both chokes and black salsify in 2023. Should be forbidden to grow chokes on allotments if you ask me…

They left the allotment without ever digging up their crop. Or, worse, even telling us about it. They just left, leaving all their *** behind, for whoever in the future to resolve it!

Their grow was also the single worst allotment when it comes to voles… a huge chunk of my 2023 summer went on trapping voles on their allotment just so that I could grow in peace. Well, the voles have spread their stuff all over the *** place. I mean in a 50 meter radius. It pops up in other people’s potatoes, dill, you name it. All my allotments are severely infested with chokes now.

Those things popped up in the middle of my garlic. Took me moths to identify what the heck that thing was. Some green that looks like a yacon relative, I pull it up, it regrows several times. I’d never planted that thing before so I didn’t recognize it. Two months later I sank in so I checked if it was those spawn of satan voles again. Sure enough they made a root cellar IN MY GARLIC PATCH out of my neighbor’s root crops!! Both salsify and chokes piled up neatly… which then grew….

Several such piles I found over the course of the summer. Five, six places only on my 200m2, that is, 30-35 meters (over 100 feet) away from the source, the original planting.

They are now a serious weed in the entire area. We can’t get rid of them. They’ve been planted by voles everywhere. Especially those that do no-dig like myself are sinking into some state of hopelessness. I mean my former neighbors’ ignorance effectively forces me to dig up 200m2 I have deliberately not dug, ever, because there’s only one thing that I prioritize over plants and that is, soil health… but no other way than to dig up all of them :smiling_imp:

/Choked by chokes

I was grounded last year but I had to move around September when they start blooming and I pulled them all up and none of them have Roots I mean bulbs on them yet the roots were bare so hopefully that when her moves into where I was living won’t have that problem

I grow them last year and I had to move in September by that time sunchoke roots are all there and I pulled them up and hopefully whoever moved into where I was living won’t have that problem

Those voles sound obnoxious!

And yes, sunchokes are definitely good at coming back if you leave tubers in the ground. I don’t mind that because I give them dedicated spots and don’t have voles moving them around randomly to other spots in the garden, but I might feel differently if I did. :sweat_smile: :sunflower:

Sunchokes are definitely a perennial, and should be planted only in places where you want them to stay.

I think perennials, in general, should really not be planted into garden spaces that may belong to somebody else next year. Community gardens in my city forbid planting any perennials into the beds – even strawberries!

I finally ordered some sunchokes this year! Unfortunately, the seller said they wouldn’t start shipping until November and then sent them to me beginning of October, so I was not ready for them. One of the four varieties molded before I ever got it in the ground. One variety had one or two potential chokes. The last two are still going strong. I have Greenstalk vertical gardens I planted them in to keep them contained. I think I might plant the remaining on the side of the road in my neighborhood to see what happens. I’m really excited. None have sprouted yet, so fingers crossed they will have sprouted when I get home from the holiday!

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Which variety molded before you ever got it into the ground? I’m sorry to hear that happened.

In case this helps, I’ve found that dry (not bone dry, just not moist) sunchoke tubers in ziploc plastic bags can be stored in the fridge for weeks without any problems. Otherwise, I would just stick any sunchoke tubers that arrive before you’re ready for them into a pot covered in dirt from the ground, and let that pot sit outside till you’re ready to plant them. Either way, they should stay dormant and not get moldy.

I personally like the harvest a bunch all at once when the weather is nice and put most into pots, covered with garden soil from the ground that I dug them up from. Then, on cold days, if I want to eat a few sunchokes, I don’t have to dig in thick, cold mud. I can just dump out a pot.

I imagine cardboard boxes would probably work just as well for that purpose as plastic plant pots.

Another thing I often do is wash a whole bunch at once, and then dry most of them for a day (to the point where they’re dry outside to the touch), and stick them in a ziploc bag in the fridge crisper drawer. I find that a convenient way to keep them easily available to eat.

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I think it was Starwhite Cluster that completely molded, but I’m visiting family this week so I would have to double check. I just kept them in the plastic bags they arrived in so I’m not surprised they molded. It was my error.

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I have made exactly the same error myself! :laughing:

What are the other cultivars you’re trying?