JArtichokes

I was given a small Jerusalem Artichoke tuber last year. We didn't quite know where to put it, as they get rather large and my parents had not experienced them before, so didn't know if they liked them...it ended up at one end of the raspberry bed. I love the beautiful sunflower-like flowers they produce. I'd had a JArtichoke before but had to move before getting to eat any, so wanted to have another go. In case you are wondering, I call them JArtichokes because I like the odd way it sounds, and am a bit lazy about rattling off Jerusalem Artichokes all the time!

We wondered for awhile there if it would ever flower...but it did!

Just this week we finally managed to have a dig and see what it had produced. My mum thought there might only be a few tubers as that's all she'd found when pulling out the dead branches, but here is our haul.

Turns out they were just down 30cm or so. We are quite impressed that all this came from a small tuber. And they were inadvertently planted on top of the concrete wall foundations so didn't have a great deal of soil available! I was surprised at how big some of the tubers were. I kept thinking that would be the end of them, only to turn up some more with my next prod of the fork!

My parents recently tried some roasted JArtichokes and quite liked them, so are quite chuffed at our produce. The only issue is that we really left it a bit late to be digging them up. They don't keep well once dug, so it would have been better to have started earlier (as soon as the plants died down) and dug them up progressively as we ate them...but we had more important things to do these past few months! Grin.

Apparently, Jersusalem Artichokes are very good for us. Or rather, they are very good for the flora living in our guts, which feed of nutrients in the JArtichokes. Aren't they the oddest looking things, all knobbly and sticking out in all directions?!

Amy