The great big thread of sunchoke info - growing, storing, eating/recipes, science facts

I've been very happy with how easy and productive the sunchokes have been but I was surprised to be shown just how vigorous they are.
Last fall, I dug out the ckokes from my GAMCOD plot. Then scrubbed and sorted them before weighing it all.
There were a few little chunks that had been cut or broken from the digging or in ground vole damage.
I just tossed them on the grass, along with the washed off dirt.
Just the other day, I noticed a few small sprouts in that bit of lawn. They are a pretty easily recognizable plant so I dug them out and they still had the tiny scraps of tubers attached!
Ive potted them up, labeled them and put out at our local post office.  ( they have a donated plant starts spot that converts to a free produce section later in the season)

The vole reframing from Michael made me laugh — genuinely useful way to look at it. Mine spread into an adjacent bed the same way and now I've just accepted they live where they want to live.

I have two varieties, both collected locally in west-central PA. USA. One, a white/tan skinned knobby tuber, possibly either a Stampede or Supernova type, behaves well. After about 1/2 hour cooking, cooking with an acid, fermenting or freezing loses its Inulin and gas production. The other, a reddish skinned smooth tuber, possibly a Fuseau variety, doesn't play nice. After a long zone 5 winter freeze, long cooking, etc. still has the power to blow your bloomers off!
We keep the red ones because they taste even better than the white ones and my wife and I take a daily Inulin supplement for gut health. We're pretty tolerant of the Inulin. We just make sure not to serve the red ones to anyone else. The white ones we harvest in the fall for pickles and relishes and we can eat them raw. We then harvest in early spring for eating raw and for dehydrating and blender-grinding for flour. The fall harvest is for cooking, dehydrating for soups, stews, roasts, instant mashed 'chokes etc. We don't worry about sabotaging others who eat the depleted Inulin. Like radioactive isotopes, it seems that 'choke tuber varieties have a different type of Inulin with different fart-lives, I mean half-lives!
I'll repeat, we keep the red ones for ourselves and only serve or give away the white ones after a winter freeze or after canning.
It's the first week of October and the white one's tops, about 5' to 6', have died and have nearly turned brown. I'll be digging some in a week or so. The red ones, about 8' to 9', are still blooming and on warm days, the Honeybees hit them hard. They have a longer maturing time. I'm not sure if it's the longer maturing time or the variety that makes the more powerful Inulin. I also harvest them like potatoes, I always wait until the tops have died and fully browned. That's when all the nutrients in the greens have drained into the tubers, making them their biggest and best tasting. It could also be the nutrients from the larger greens that make the stouter Inulin?
We've had quite a bit of rain this summer and I'm hoping they aren't going to be pithy from too much water. That's happened a couple other wet summers. Other pithy root veggies are due to too much water too.
One advantage of being intolerant to Inulin is Bedtime Football.  ??  What's Bedtime Football you ask? That's the two of you, side by side, ripping off the longest and loudest farts you can. You'll know it's halftime, time to switch sides, when one of you soils the sheets.
I'll bet none of you ever thought you could cringe, shudder, laugh and go eeewww at the same time. Eh?