Love seeing the skirret enthusiasm here. I've had a few useful observations on skirret over the years.
Skirret don't like wet feet. They thrive in aerobic soil conditions without standing water.
They also don't seem to respond well to a fertilization regime. (Manure, too much compost, or fish fertilizer etc.)
The best skirret I've grown are in soils that are high in carbonaceous material, and the resulting humic component from the inhabitant soil life.
Skirret form relationship with endomychorrizal fungi.
If there are a high concentration of soluble nutrients leaching into the soil, plants will not release the exudates that are necessary to attract mycorrhizae and other important microorganisms. The fungi need to sense that sweet carbon juice so they know where to go!
My healthiest skirrets grew in a polyculture that was planted into a very thick layer of partially decomposed arboreal wood chips. (I added some green manure and a lot of coffee grounds to the wood chips to speed up composting and turned the pile a couple times through the season.)
The layer of chips ranged from 6 inches to 1 foot high. This is because my beds are usually irregular shapes with different elevations and little mini swales. I planted the skirret seedlings right next to comfrey, sunchokes, patience dock, and hopniss. The comfrey and patience dock were on the sunny side. I kept those two chopped back initially to let the sun warm the soil, and keep those shady slugs away from my baby skirrets! As the season progressed, I let them grow out to shade the soil and relieve the other plants from hot winds. I'm in the Pacific Northwest, Fraser Valley. I only watered the beds if I saw any signs of drought stress. We get wet warm winters and dry-ish summers with some droughts and the occasional heat wave. By the time fall came the skirret plants were taller than me, and they had thrown seed everywhere.
I had to move the following year, so I scraped up the beds and plants, and kept them heeled in wood chips over the winter. I've made a new bed for them at my family farm now and new seedlings are popping up everywhere out of the chips. Here's the new poly culture bed:
