jeruselm artichoke aka sunchoke + hops

I am starting some jerusalem artichokes. They look like they grow fast tall and strong. I also have some hop plants in delivery. I was wondering if the sunchokes are planted around the hop plant, if they could act as a living trellis? I would appreciate opinions of those who had experience with these plants.

Technically yes they could but in reality their spring timing may be off, we got hops coming up now but only a few surface dwelling chokes. I've look at what bindweed does to them and yes they grow just fine but bindweed leaves are small and get exhausted wrapping up the stem. I don't think your hop yields would be very good, and in the spring the hops may choke the chokes out and in the summer the chokes will shade out the hops. I think it's worth a try though because your growing conditions might give you an early start on the chokes I don't have. But i wouldn't call them complimentary companions just yet, if your chokes arn't established they could come up small and then get wiped out. In about 3 weeks grocery store chokes are going to start getting harder to find, when i first started out I was lucky to get 4 feet of height out of them but now they grow to 12 feet every year and I think i might put those hop roots my wife set aside for me under a few.

Thanks. That is exactly what I needed to know. Last risk of frost has not yet past, for me, zone 5a. So I am guessing you probably have a bit better conditions for it than I.

I have a usless bush/tree on the corner of my lot, it produces a berry the birds wont eat, and has many trunks, and I don't even know what it is. But maybe I will run make posts out of cuttings from it, for a vertical. Then run horizontal wires connecting to my house. I am considering getting some mullbery trees and copicing them for grapes and hops. But there must be something out there that hops were "meant" to grow on.


I lived in Yakima for a while so you would think I should know something about hops.