Cécile Stelzer Johnson

Hmm. "Edible AND perennial". That makes it tougher: If it is edible, deer and other wildlife may savage your hedge to nibble your goodies and it won't remain "perennial" very long.
Also, you need to think about the purpose of your hedge first: To keep critters out? To keep critters in? Fence off the neighbors? Use every bit of your land but you have a small place to deal with?
That will help you wean out your losers. Good luck on finding your best candidates.

Lynne Cim wrote:Raspberries with strawberries and herbs planted between? My raspberries are certainly a good fence height now but depends if you need a deer resistant hedge (?)  Side note, we killed of some of our raspberry plants by using metal wire to hold them more in a more vertical row. Any part touching metal died. Next year will use a softer, non conductive twine instead.

Yep: during a very hot summer, that metal gets quite hot, and green raspberry shoots coming in contact will be damaged from the point on contact up. That alone should not outright kill a healthy raspberry, though. Did you also have a drought this year?
Deer will reach inside a fence to get at the green shoots, so you might need another fence about 2 ft from your raspberry plants. I assume that your raspberries are in a raised bed? If so, the deer shouldn't bother them: Deer are opportunistic... and lazy.
They are also afraid, if they have to jump, that they will not "stick the landing" and hurt themselves. While they can jump 7 ft if fear motivates them, they won't bother to jump even a 6 ft fence if you introduce a risk : vertical rebars or spikes, different heights will discourage them. Also, if you have a tarp or something they can't see through, they won't jump: their eyes are on each side of their head, which makes it difficult to appreciate distance properly. A zigzag pattern is another foil.
Are you sure about mixing strawberries and raspberries? Harvesting strawberries in a thorny patch isn't fun...

Thekla McDaniels wrote:

I guess there are tubers below ground, but I am having gut issues and it is probably not the best time to introduce a totally new food item which is rumored to irritate the gut in some people.  The tubers are there incase of starvation conditions or maybe I missed the best harvest conditions.  I don’t know much about harvesting them.
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About these "gut issues". It's a pity that you have gut issues with them as these tall plants are very resilient and do produce an enormous amount of food for  practically nothing.
The red ones are quite farty, the white ones not so much.
The culprit is inulin. To lessen its effects:
• Acid boiling: Simmer sliced sunchokes in water mixed with lemon juice or vinegar for about 10 to 15 minutes before roasting or using them in a recipe.
• Fermentation: Pickle the sunchokes first, as the live bacteria consume the gas-producing inulin during the jarring process.
• Smaller portions: Eat small amounts at a time so your digestive system can adjust to the prebiotic fiber. I know that the first time I consume them, I must use only a small amount, then I can increase the dose. Eventually, I can eat a normal portion raw. (It's a bit like mosquito bites: the first ones of the season cause the biggest reaction. afterwards, not so much.)
• Pair with digestive herbs: Serve your dish alongside carminative herbs and spices like ginger, fennel, or peppermint tea

I'm in zone 4b, Central Sands of Wisconsin, and every once in a while, I get some volunteer escapee from a previous year that start growing in the spring. The only thing that's stopping me from planting them in the Fall is that mice, voles and other critters would no doubt help themselves, but it's interesting to note that even in a Wisconsin winter and relatively unprotected, (The mulch gets disturbed) some potatoes survive to live another season..
It is to be noted also that during WWII, when the French had very little, they would peel potatoes just a bit thicker and bury the peelings in their cellars. Some marble sized spuds would still grow from that treatment. Mom said they were quite good, just very small, even though they had zero sun.
If I could get them started in my basement and transplanted after the last spring frost, I might have something there.

If you are lucky enough to live in an area near a town where folks have to rake their leaves and bag them, leave them for pickup on the street, you are very lucky. If additionally you have a mulcher to reduce the volume, you are blessed. I give folks who will let me take their leaves one clean empty bag for each bag I take. (The bags have to be paper sacks, so the town can make "compost". Or at least add it to their compost).
I take all I can during the season, especially from sugar maple trees. (and I can pick up the seeds too).

I try to harvest all of my sunchoke each year, as tubers of the year are more rounded, easier to clean, and since they escaped in my garden, that's going to be quite a chore. I can then sort them, keep the largest/ best ones for us. The damaged ones can go to the chickens or as bait to the deer who absolutely go bananas for them, and hubby still dreams of "bagging the Big One". They made flowers for us this year, but we are expecting our first frost in a week, so I might as well clip them for bouquets: I'll never get seeds out of them, and that will encourage more tuber production, although it's getting late.
I won't do much with the leaves: they can fall and rot wherever they are.
With my brand new machete, the large stalks can be dried out and planted in my hugel to stop the strong winds we can get from the West and North. They will add a lot of height protection. The small ones can be shredded and added as mulch wherever I need mulch which is... everywhere...
Anyway, that's the plan as of 9/29/26.

My hat off to you, Kena, for getting every scrap of human food used by humans.
It's sad to say, but  my parents survived WWII on "topinambours", what we know here as sunchokes. I was born in '48, and my dad so hated topinambours from eating them at nearly every meal, that mom never brought them to the table again after 1946, when things eased up a bit.
As a result, I had no idea what they were, and I suspect that many recipes that were invented out of the sheer NEED to feed your family soon disappeared from our tables as soon as hard times were over.
My dad's father had him pick worms with a knife out of the "well aged" cheese they would then sell at the market to make a bit of money "on the side". Coffee made from the chicory root or the dandelion root soon disappeared with the end of the war, when coffee finally came back.
The sad fact of the matter is that we are, by nature, "wasteful and unclean", to paraphrase the Bible.
Not mentioned in your piece is that "rules" are now making it harder to "use everything".
My local food pantry accepts my eggs (and my eggs only) because I write on the carton the date at which they were pulled from under the hens.
I approached my local store about getting expired lettuce and other items that are no longer saleable. I was told, in a whisper: "Oh God, no. Don't ask me to do this: I could lose my job!"
I used to take my chickens to a place about 1.5 hours north of here to get butchered and I requested the feathers back, to make feather meal, as a fertilizer. The answer: "Are you sure? We have to pour bleach on them and they get carted away to the landfill. It's very expensive. I'm not even sure we could give you yours back without pouring bleach on them". I have been slaughtering my own ever since.
This, I noticed is a very American thing. Everything has to be washed and sanitized, even these dumb feathers!
I wanted to buy some cucumbers as my crop failed totally. They looked shiny because wax had been rubbed on them (first 'protection'.). They already were in a bag (second 'protection'). But to get out of the store, they had to be in a bag. "Paper or plastic"? I had brought my own bag and told the cashier: "C'mon: they are already waxed and plastified. They can just go as is in my bag to carry them to the car".
Well, she had to place a sticker on my bag!
That's when I understood: the paper sac or the plastic bag is a 'proof' of sorts that I have paid for the merchandise.
Some hunters who kill deer but don't care to eat it will take it to a local place to give them to a food pantry. Well, the carcasses have to be inspected. (Which in a way, I understand, because some folks just don't take good care of the meat after they dispatch the deer). You are better off asking a hunter to give you a deer directly. We've heard of a whole day's hunt being taken to the dump from that facility because they could not get to it.
Insane!
I'll tell you, though: Necessity is the Mother of invention, and when hard times come again, (pretty soon from the look of it), folks will make different choices, just to survive.

May Gardner wrote:You know I've thought of that too--for gophers instead, as we have many. I don't know how it is with mole diggings, but I've noticed that nothing grows very well where the gophers have dug for quite some time. It's odd as you'd think things would grow better, and that it'd stir up at least weed seeds, like when you disturb the soil by digging it with a fork or shovel, but no. Things just don't grow in there for at least a season.

That's interesting as it is counter intuitive. But I remember that at least one other person made a similar remark.

Hmm. Using moles to till your garden beds sounds like a great idea at first: they sure are tilling the heck out of my little lawn right now! How would you bait them to visit your beds?
Because moles are insectivores and carnivores, they do not eat plant roots, bulbs, (yeah, great!) or grass.
So, yeah, you will still have to deal with your Johnson grass, which is a curse here, in my sandbox..
Their diet consists of  90% earthworms. Then beetles and other insects, spiders... Beetles, ants, crickets, slugs, centipedes and millipedes.
I want to keep my earthworms, though.
Another question is: After they have tilled your beds, how will you get rid of them? Will they come back once your  earthworms do?
Is there a critter that would rid me on Johnson grass and other undesirables while leaving my bulbs and roots alone?