[ID: 1. A colander full of lumpy, dirt covered tubers. 2. A hand holds an exceptionally large lumpy tuber, it’s about the same size as the hand]
We harvested the sunchokes today. 3lbs 10oz (1.6kg) of tubers from 10 plants in rough conditions. I'm honestly surprised we got even a single tuber, let alone this many.
Our sunchoke plants survived:
Being mailed as starts. A relative had too many, put the small starts in a bag in one of those USPS flat rate boxes and mailed them to us. (We did lose a few here, it's not ideal for the plant)
Soil with basically no nutrition
Not being watered when life was hard
Tropical storm force winds (one sunchoke got a splint after snapping in half and , not only did it survive, but it produced the largest tuber we got)
Days of flooding (and many more days of wet soil because the clay we have did not drain well)
Some weird crusty bug I still don't have an ID for
Not a single other plant has been low maintenance like these. Everything else requires babying in this poor environment, but not the sunchokes. I'm thoroughly convinced that if any plant grew wild on the moon, it would be these.