BRK #381
It was a rainy Friday and we ended up holding off on the welding job. That's likely Monday. Meanwhile, we ended up experimenting with a few methods of preserving sunchokes (and cooking them for dinner later). We were heavily inspired by
Prepper Potpourri and the
Maritime Gardening Podcast for today's activities.
First we wanted to dehydrate sunchokes. Step one was to clean and then slice them.
Next, you parboil them in lemon
water for one minute.
After cooling them in cold water, we took them down to the rocket-boosted dehydrator, behind the Classroom. Here's
Liam prepping the fire. Soon everything was cooking like we needed.
I lined the sliced sunchokes on the drying racks, here.
So we had a fire earlier this afternoon. I'll stoke another one tonight, and then another one tomorrow morning.
In the afternoon, we went up to the Lab to store sunchokes
underground.
Paul suggested that the
Truly Passive Greenhouse might become too warm, so we attempted a different method. Our first step was to select a location. We chose the "endcap" of one of the sun-scoops within the perimeter
fence at Allerton Abbey. Here, we raked-away the mulch and marked-out the corners of our rudimentary passive heater.
The next step was to agitate the space a bit, then combine the soil with a bit more sand to provide additional drainage.
We then began filling in the location with sunchokes. We followed Liam's idea of digging out a shallow trench, then arranging the sunchokes so they wouldn't touch one another prior to being buried.
To wrap this method, we placed a surplus window over the spot. This effects a micro-climate that helps keep the sunchokes from freezing.
We'll see how these sunchokes do in about a week. If all seems well, we'll try doing this with more of the sunchokes we harvest (there are
so many this year...!). I'm also still fairly hopeful that the pickled sunchokes are all right. After a few checks this week they still seem in good shape, so after a taste-test I might go for a larger jar or two to pickle more of them.
Liam and I topped off the day with some air-fried and pan-fried sunchokes, wild onions, and greens for dinner. Not a bad Friday at all.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!
![](https://permies.com/images/smilies/grin.gif)