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Five reasons to consider planting Jerusalem Artichokes

Spring is beginning to raise its beautiful green head above the parapet and with it our green fingers begin to itch to get in the soil. Winter time is a great time to plan your next gardening adventures and in case you have a wee bit more room in your beds, I’m going to sing the praises of Jerusalem Artichokes.

They’re Beautiful. Even someone as dedicated to the mantra of “everything must first be edible and useful” will admit, it is difficult not to smile when the sunny yellow heads of this Sunflower relative are in bloom.

Protection and improvement of cropping. Standing at up to 2m tall Jeruselums make an excellent semipermeable wind break for your less wind tolerant crops. Planting these in a row on the winds prevailing side can shelter more delicate crops and help increase yield.

Crop well with little fuss. Every gardener needs a crop that is less fussy and provides abundance whilst being low maintenance. These guys are it.

Easy to harvest. Once the tops begin to turn golden and the bite is in the air all you need is a fork to lift the lovely tuber and brush off excess mud.

Grade A hotels. Once harvested the stems of the plant should be left in situ. Their hollow stems make great over wintering “hotels” for our beneficial insect friends. This gives your garden a head start in the spring as your good guys are in the correct geographical region to nip out any of the bad guys who have overwintered in your soil. After the risk of frost has passed, the insects will have moved out of the stems, the stems can then be added as an excellent carbonaceous element to your compost pile, completing the circle.

An excellent alternative starch. Jerusalem Artichokes are very versatile in the kitchen and their lightly nutty taste is quite a winner. They can be grated raw as part of salad, sliced and lightly steamed to add crunchy to a stir fry, pureed or scrubbed and roasted with rosemary and sea salt as an attractive side. Some people do experience wind with eating them, so it is best to eat small amounts at any one time.

Readying rhubarb for the coming spring

Here in the United Kingdom Rhubarb enjoys a rather prestigious place in the culinary calendar. The pale pink slender stems of “Champagne Rhubarb” are both the ushers of spring and the first reliable cash crop of the year. No matter how much is grown at Organic Lea, the demand far outstrips the supply our mere 2 acres of diverse intensive farming can produce.

Champagne Rhubarb production is lucrative, but it can also be relatively expensive as the crop is grown in heated forcing sheds. Currently, nine square miles of West Yorkshire, is known as “The Rhubarb Triangle” and encompasses twelve farms. In 2010 these farmers approached the European Commission’s Protected Food Name scheme and were awarded Protected Designation of Origin status (PDO) for the term, “Yorkshire forced rhubarb.” Forcing Rhubarb is big business for some, however it can be done with some success in a low tech way small scale using your netting wires and a blackout cloth.

For many growers, Rhubarb is planted once. It’s widely accepted that some vegetables like Rhubarb, Asparagus and Jerusalem Artichoke, stay put when planted and remain indefinitely. Many successful allotments and growers subscribe to this thinking and harvest successfully year on year. Organic Lea is committed to using two of it’s acres to intensive organic farming and rotation is a key element in keeping both plants and soil healthy. This means that even crops that traditionally stay “forever” in one place are included in rotation, albeit for these crops they move once every four years.

This is year four for our early Rhubarb crop and the first year of it’s rotation, so this week we uprooted one of the four rows of Timperley Early and began the process of splitting and moving it to the area of the farm called The West Bank, or Salad Terrace. Over the years, the team have noticed that the Salad Terrace is the coldest plot on the farm. It is also the most over run with Horsetail. The thinking is, that Timperly Early will not suffer from the slightly colder micro climate and that with it’s maturity it’s wide leaves may also slow the rampant encroachment of one of the world’s oldest known “weeds.” Both of these factors have inhibited the Asparagus from reaching it’s full potential so we are effectively preforming an experimental swap of the two.

Splitting the Rhubarb serves two purposes, the first and most obvious is propagation. Mature crowns are quite easily split to produce multiple plants. To do this effectively one only need ensure each split contains both root and bud, we leave two to three buds in a spit.

The second reason for splitting is to cut away the heart. This may seem counter-intuitive, however the older a plant is, the more susceptible it becomes to disease. By lifting and splitting the crowns and cutting out the old growth we are taking preventative measures against potential disease in the crop. The oldest part, or heart then is added to our compost completing its circle.

Growing Diversity: saving Jerusalem Artichoke seed

Before the ground freezes, and after the stocks have turned crunchy and golden is the time lift and store our Jerusalem Artichoke tubers. These starchy little wonders will liven up your meals through the dark days of January and February as well as add an element of beauty during the growing season, but you already know that if your now reading about how to save the tubers for next season!

Similar to what we look for when harvesting Garlic for seed, you are again looking to save and replant prime specimens. Those that we plant should be those with the positive traits we want to encourage in order to improve our seed stock and harvest year on year.

With Jerusalem Artichoke, this means setting aside those golfball size tubers, that are knob and blemish free. The should not show any sign of blight, insect damage or disease. One you’ve set aside your seed stock you’ll need to store it before it’s time to go in the ground again. Always try and store a small percentage more than you think you are likely to need as with planting there will always be the chance of failure in a few.

For the best chance of a successful storage, you’ll want a container big enough so you can layer the tubers in without them touching each other. I begin with a layer of moist coir approximately 3cm thick and position my first layer of tubers being careful to ensure a good amount of room around them so that they are not going to shift and touch each other. This is very important. By isolating each tuber you are minimizing the risk of contamination. A rotting tuber which contacts another with expedite the rotting process in the next.

After the first layer I cover it with a thick layer of coir, approximately another 3cm to avoid vertical contact between the layers. This process is repeated until all the seed tubers are bedded into and covered with coir. The whole bucket then sits in the ambient storage until planting begins again in spring.

Putting the asparagus beds to bed

Kilo for kilo Asparagus consistently rates as one of top performers of the farm. When it’s in season it sells out. That is, by definition, product demand. As someone who spent countless hours over the past year, propagating, planting, weeding, hoeing and harvesting it fills me with pride and pleasure when folks are excited by and buying our veg. Feeling this way, is enough motivation for me personally to grow it.

In our modern society where a trip to the supermarket can supply you with nearly anything at anytime of the year, Asparagus being one of the few hold outs makes it special. In the south of england, Asparagus season falls in between May and June, an incredibly small harvest season by any standard. Add to this that an Asparagus bed takes four years tending before a first cropping can be expected and it isn’t difficult to see why it is likely to stay a seasonal veg.

After the last harvest in June the plant is allowed to grow to its full potential, the delicate spears transform into beautiful branches and in the late summer and early fall it’s tiny spherical fruits ripen to a deep shade of garnet as the stocks die back transforming to a brittle stand of golden beige. It’s a this stage in the first weeks of December that we put the Asparagus beds “to bed.”

Before the dry stocks are cut back, we weed the bed a final time. Keeping the dry stocks in situ while doing this allows us to easily estimate where on the bed it is safe to dig. The next years growth of asparagus spears are dependent on their crowns sitting just below the surface of the soil and digging weeds too close to them can inadvertently cause damage.

Community projects

For the past 9 months I have been a regular volunteer and a trainee at an organic farm in Chingford called Organic Lea. I love them. They offer a space to learn skills and meet people as well as running a box scheme feeds over 300 local families. Over my time with them, one of the things I find most inspiring is their constant drive to evolve the site.

Since 2001 they’ve had the land and the transformation has been incredible. You can read about this in detail on their website. One of the projects has been a community wine making and in true community fashion throughout September on Fridays they are accepting grapes from local gardens for processing into wine. For those not interested in wine, the farm also has a community juicing day where people are encouraged to bring their apples and pears along with bottles and help process juices.

How many folks have grape vines or fruit trees even but don’t actually use the produce? Many. It might be that they inherited a garden or they don’t have the skills to make good wine, aren’t sure about how to use pears or apples or perhaps they don’t have the time. What ever the reason, this project is a complete win:win scenario.

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garden and plate

growing in the garden and kitchen for a richer life