Harvesting Jerusalem artichokes is one of those jobs that confuses visitors before it delights them. When I give tours of my place I’m asked why there are stalks of dead plants all over the place. As unsightly as they are (normally explained away as ‘permaculture is in the eye of the beholder’), the stalks are the only remains of the mighty Jerusalem Artichoke.
By keeping the dead stalks there over the Winter, it’s easy to find the delightful tubers just beneath the surface. They will keep all Winter in the soil, and what you don’t collect will start to grow anew from mid-Spring. If you want to see what this plant looks like in full flower before it dies back, I covered that stage in an earlier visual guide to growing Jerusalem artichokes.
You can see below how the tubers spread under an irrigation pipe. Only thing you need to be mindful of with Jerusalem Artichokes is that they become invasive if you let them.
Any shoots coming out in mid-Spring that you don’t want? Pull them out in good time.
Harvesting Jerusalem artichokes is easiest with a garden fork rather than a spade, since a spade is far more likely to slice through a tuber and bruise it before it makes it to the kitchen. Once out of the ground they don’t store well. I’ll keep the ones I’m not eating straight away back in a bucket of damp soil until needed. This last Winter’s harvest was one of the better ones, similar in yield to what I found during the last harvest of Autumn the year before.
Related articles
- Two Must-have Survival Root Crops: Jerusalem Artichokes and Cassava (modernhomesteaders.net)
- Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution (topdocumentaryfilms.com)
- Sunchokes in Alaska (alaskapublic.org)
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