Hi, everyone. I apologize if this question's been covered already. I'm new around here and it's a really long thread.
My question has to do with sunchokes expanding out of their container.
I live in zone 7, in a little townhouse with lots of shade. I do most of my growing in containers because digging in the topsoil feels too much like work. My growing medium of choice is my homemade compost. I've been growing perennial root vegetables including sunchokes for just under a year.
In the late Fall, I harvested whatever tubers I could find and replanted one tuber in each container. Right now, the sunchokes are sending up shoots.
I have this one container, which used to be a cat litter sifter, situated between four other containers which are growing hops. It's located just a few inches from a fence, and just on the other side of that fence, my neighbor has a grapevine and loads of honeysuckle vines. This container seems to be holding the most prolific of my sunchokes. I went out there today and found a bunch of shoots coming up around the base of the container. I tried pulling the container up from the ground, and found roots growing through the bottom and into the soil below.
So my question is: how should I respond to the sunchoke roots expanding into the soil below their container? Should I pull them out of the soil and replant them in separate, smaller containers? (I don't really have any more containers available of the same size I'm already using for these.) And if so, should I do that now? Or wait until the Fall, after the foliage dies back?
Note: I have two large trees and several smaller trees growing in my back yard. The area where I'm keeping most of the sunchokes is one of the sunnier parts of the yard, but the ground is packed with big roots all over.
