Sam Shade

paul wheaton wrote:At this moment, I think there are two big things to get past the sunchoke comedy:


      - harvest after a hard frost


      - build your gut biome to digest this new thing


That's it.  

David the good (one of the staff here at permies.com) just posted  a video bashing sunchokes

Note that david is in alabama.  Warmer climate.  Does he ever get a hard frost?  I also wonder if he goes easy on getting started each year?  

He's right that the gas effect is a big barrier to mass adoption. And I don't think it's a climate thing, as I believe (long time watcher of his youtube channel) he first grew them when he was in TN.

But I think his PTSD from going to big on eating them all at once is clouding his judgement here. From my anecdotal experience, the gut adjusts to gradual exposure over longer periods of time. And the flavor is so good (I think they are superior to potatoes, sweet potatoes and yams in flavor) that I think people will come back to them if they can moderate the amounts initially.

Further, their extreme utility as an animal feed should keep them around long enough for every homesteader to figure out many culinary uses for them.

Gordon Blair wrote:...

And could I really get serious calories (without side effects) eating it as a potato substitute? The inulin conversion would never be close to 100% (I may be wrong about this?) and while some people may adapt to tolerate inulin more with exposure, it's the gastro-bugs that reap most of the calories, right? Maybe some of it is released in a human-digestible form, but it can't compare with eating potatoes and directly getting the starch, I would think..? ...

Inulin tolerance would suggest that your body was digesting the inulin and not leaving so much for the bacteria, hence the lower production of gas. Even if not 100%, that's still a big boost to its caloric value.

Based on my own limited experience with a family of 7 and 5 acres in a 7/8 zone and not a lot of free time, here's what I would do.

#1 Goats. The easiest livestock to feed, bar none. They eat almost all the weeds, including a lot of easy winter fodder: evergreens like privet, pine and honeysuckle.  Their fencing is hard to get right at first,  but once you have that is smooth sailing and you've got a great source of meat and milk for the roughest acres.

#2 Ducks.  Great foragers, good at avoiding predators,  lower maintenance than chickens. Meat and eggs. Just need a little water.

#3 Jerusalem artichokes. The ultimate no input, high yield staple,  available 5 months out of the year fresh. Very useful as animal fodder too.

#4 Figs & Mulberries. Weedy growth,  long harvesting windows, easy to preserve.

#5 Moringa. Needs some babying in the winter but worth it. A multivitamin in salad form.

#6 Kale. Great to have when all the other greens are gone. Handles neglect beautifully.

#7 Cherry tomatoes. Everbearing, prolific, easy harvest and the most prolific self seeder I've ever come across.

#8 Sorghum. The easiest grain. If you can get a cane press, a terrific dual use plant as well.

#9 Chinese chestnuts.  Very vigorous. Early producers. Processing is a little bit of a pain but can't beat the yield.

#10 Water lotus.  Dependent on water again but a beautiful and versatile food crop that can take a beating.

Privet.

Spreads by suckers and seed. Evergreen. Incredibly dense thickets. Will grow thirty feet in sun but even full shade won't stop it. Will pop out of any soil. Can coppice/pollard it several times a year.

Excellent year round goat forage. Chickens like the berries (a rare winter food source). Pretty white flowers.

Produces decent poles and firewood.

Squabs a great urban meat source. Ditto rabbits.

I'm in Memphis and I've seen a goat and a lot of chickens in the city proper.

Once people get used to something there tends to be more of it regardless of zoning and ordinances.

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:

Dian Green wrote:We've had hard frost so I dug out the sunchokes from my gamcod plot.
Got a bit over 10 kg.
Most were lovely, but as I went to the south end of the patch, several were showing damage.
The ground was not disturbed, so not likely rodents, and I didn't see any bugs around them that could be the cause.
We do have white grubs in large numbers and I could smell ants as I was digging.  
Anh ideas what could be the cause and any suggestions on how to help them next year?
At least they seem to handle the damage well and don't all rot or anything.

So, 10 Kgs out of 200 square feet, so a plot that is about 14 ft X 14 ft, if square. That's not too bad. I don't grow the pink kind as they are really gassy and give me cramps. The white kind isn't nearly as bad.
I suspect if the damage was due to white grubs or ants, you would have found some when digging them out,  but you do not mention that.
If you look really close, I think you will find small, narrow, gnawing teeth marks by a rodent. My bet is also voles.
https://fox-pest.com/pest-files/voles/
Know thy enemy! This article will give you a leg up when fighting these nasty little critters. They reproduce very fast, too.
One saving grace is that although they can climb trees, they can't climb smooth surfaces. That is why I grow mine in half 55 gallon plastic barrels. Even on trees, they are not good climbers. (But they will girdle any young tree to death if allowed to get close! - Ask me how I know!)
If you want to grow sunchokes in the presence of voles, your best bet is to establish a barrier. Tight mesh that they cannot get through, under or over would be best, or grow them in containers, like me. An advantage of growing them in containers is that at the end of the season, you can collect every little bit of sunchoke without having to dig to Timbuktu. You can then select your biggest ones for eating and replant your smallest ones immediately, just like garlic,
That is one less crop you won't have to plant next spring!
The bad part about planting them in a container is that they are then totally dependent on you for watering and enriching the soil... I do the same for sweet potatoes to keep voles away and not having to dig too far.

I just plant sweet potatoes and the voles leave the Jerusalem artichokes alone to decimate the sweet potatoes.

Looks like vole damage to me.

Just got my rabbits back going so I'm planning to phase the moms into a mostly homegrown diet to get forage friendly new generations.

The plan is to run them over my meadows of crabgrass/bermuda grass in rabbit tractors, then supplement with kudzu vine, jerusalem artichoke tops, kale, comfrey, willow/mulberry/black locust cuttings during the warm weather months.

Not sure I'll have the time to make sufficient hay for the winter months, so it'll probably be purchased hay and pellets from December-March.

Winter is the ultimate test for any self-sufficiency plan - can you motivate yourself to do a bunch of extra work in the warm weather so you don't have to buy winter feed?

This is where goats are much more appealing than rabbit  to me: they are relatively easy to feed in winter with all the evergreen shrubs and trees.

Pollarding is my primary goat fodder strategy.

So far it's been a very effective means of getting lots of privet, maple, elm, and mulberry in harvestable range. Also using it to keep my chestnuts from getting too huge.

Kaarina Kreus wrote:I was thinking of having one buck per year. I do that with my roosters. Change the head rooster every year plus butcher male offspring during winter.
All my farmer friends warn about inbreeding. One said that for some reason, it is the weak traits that are strengthened in inbreeding.

I was wondering, if I could put the bucks into the chicken run and the roosters into the rabbit run?

Would not recommend. Chickens are really mean to rabbits.