soggy donkey herder on Nostr: This is half of my #sunchoke harvest! This spring, I put three chokes each in two big ...

This is half of my #sunchoke harvest! This spring, I put three chokes each in two big fabric plant pots and buried them in a foot of not very finished stall bedding compost. I mostly remembered to water them, and they grew to 8’ tall with pretty yellow flowers. The stems are dying back, so I emptied out one pot and got about 50 tubers. The compost had transformed into crumbly finished stuff and shrunk to maybe 4” thick.
After I picked out all the tubers, I invited the chickens over to comb through the leftover compost for bugs.
I really like the taste of sunchokes, but the massive gas makes them no fun. (They make everybody fart, because they contain a lot of inulin, a sweet carbohydrate that our bodies can’t digest but our intestinal bacteria *love.*) I’m going to offer some tubers to the rats, then roast the rest and offer them to the chickens, and the rats again.
I’ll keep growing them even though we don’t eat them. They’re very pretty when safely confined to pots, and you never know when you might get hungry enough for fartichokes.