I'm moving onto an acre of land in Surrey where I'll be able to put about an 1/8th of it into garden and food production. Last year we had a small garden (16 sq. Ft.) at the townhouse we were renting. I read about sunchokes here on permies in late 2012 and found some at a local market. We liked them and had the presence of mind to plant a large tuber in the small garden patch. At the end of the growing season I must have dug up 10 lbs in total. I was amazed at the production!
I have maybe 7-10 tubers left in the soil that I can take with me, but I am looking for much more as we plan to eat a lot more of them this year, as well as provide feed for the chickens we will be raising there. Are any of you Vancouver area permies willing to sell us some tubers to help seed our system?
There's a shop in vancouver called Don's market
http://www.donaldsmarket.com/locations.htm This time of year i can usually buy a box of about 100-120 sunchokes for 30 dollars, if you go to the garden shop you'll pay 10 bux for 4 dry chokes.
It's a bit late for starter's everything is shooting through the earth upwards and used up all it's tuber energy but the ones in the market have been in dry cold storage all winter.
Thanks Saybian. I'll have to check that out for sure. What a deal!
I have about 10 tubers that I had planted back into various spots in the garden last fall, then I mulched over everything with straw. The mulch seems to have kept the soil cool enough that my tubers haven't begun sprouting yet (I dug out as many as I could find yesterday to plant at the new place). One had started to put out some tiny roots. Maybe I have a late sprouting variety?
Saybian Morgan
gardener
Posts: 582
Location: Lower Mainland British Columbia Canada Zone 8a/ Manchester Jamaica
mine arn't up, and some of my best growing spots have to come up through 3 inches of woodchips i use to hold the bindweed back. I don't think ever this time of year, usually i don't remember I want tubers till may n just plant em late. If they came up now it would be murder by nature for the greens, it's Rubarb season at the moment.
I was in Vancouver two days ago so I stopped in to Donald's Market. I cleaned them out of sunchokes! I picked up 11 lbs for just over $30. It'll be interesting to see what kind of yield we'll see from that many tubers. If we see anything near what we got from one plant last year, we'll be swimming in sunchokes this winter. Thanks again Saybian!
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sells three varieties - they're located in Salmon Arm BC, but ship to all of Canada.
