Zone 5 · Experimental plant nursery
Jerusalem artichoke — sunchoke — is a native sunflower that grows ten feet tall, shrugs off drought and frost, and puts a crop of crisp, nutty tubers in the ground under your feet.
Not a crop you replant every spring. A patch you own.
Why grow it
It's the best calorie-for-effort crop I grow. A hundred feet of row gives you about 250 pounds of tubers, and federal trials put commercial plantings at 12,000–22,000 pounds per acre. You plant it once.
The tops die at first frost. The tubers don't — they stay alive in the ground all winter and get sweeter as starch turns to sugar. No cellar, no canning, no freezer. Dig what you need before the ground freezes, then again as soon as it thaws in spring.
Helianthus tuberosus comes from the Great Lakes and Mississippi valleys. Late in the season it throws yellow daisy flowers, right when the rest of the garden has quit, and the pollinators come. The tall stalks double as a windbreak and hold a slope against erosion.
Raw it's crisp like jicama. Roasted it's nutty and sweet, with a finish that tastes like an artichoke heart. Per 100 g: 73 calories, 429 mg potassium, 3 mg iron, and a glycemic index of 32 — potatoes are in the eighties. Its fiber is inulin, a prebiotic at 10–22% of fresh weight, the most of any vegetable.
No fertilizer, no sprays, no watering. It tolerates drought and frost, thrives in poor soil, and has no real pests or diseases. It'll grow on ground you wouldn't bother to plough.
How much to buy
One pound of tubers planted becomes about five pounds in the ground by the end of the season. Leave them, and that's twenty-five the year after.
| What you plant | End of season 1 | Season 2, unharvested | Season 3, unharvested |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 ounces — $18 | ≈ 2.5 lb | ≈ 12 lb | ≈ 62 lb |
| 1 pound — $27 | ≈ 5 lb | ≈ 25 lb | ≈ 125 lb |
| 3 pounds — $50 | ≈ 15 lb | ≈ 75 lb | ≈ 375 lb |
Read the bottom row again. Fifty dollars buys three pounds of tubers. That's fifteen pounds by fall, and seventy-five the year after. If you want to be eating tubers this winter, plant several pounds now.
Before you plant
Neither is a dealbreaker. Both are easy to handle — as long as you know about them before your first harvest, not after.
Inulin is a fiber your small intestine can't digest. It reaches your colon, bacteria ferment it, and you get gas. That's exactly what makes it a good prebiotic — and why a big bowl of raw sunchokes can ruin an evening.
It's a preparation problem, not a flaw. Cook them with something acidic, cook them long, ferment them, or just start with small portions.
Cook them properly and start slowly, and it's a non-issue. Eat half a pound raw on the first night and it isn't.
Once established they spread 2–4 feet a year, and any fragment of tuber left in the soil comes up. It's the same vigor that makes them yield so heavily, so you don't fight it — you plan for it.
My method: at harvest I take every large tuber. That leaves more than enough to regrow the whole patch, for free, every year.
Give them their own bed with a mown border and harvest hard, and you'll never have a problem. Plant them mid-garden and you'll fight them for a decade.
| Method | Why it works | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Cook with acid | Lemon juice or vinegar in the water breaks the inulin down into sugars your gut can handle. The most reliable trick there is. | None |
| Ferment or pickle | The bacteria do the work before you eat it. The people who report a total fix are almost always doing this. | A week in a jar |
| Cook it long | Slow cooking breaks down the long chains. A quick hot roast doesn't. | An hour or more |
| Start small | Your gut adapts to a new fiber if you introduce it gradually. A few tubers, then build. | Patience |
Plant · Grow · Harvest
The one way to kill them is wet feet — standing water rots tubers fast. If your bed holds water in spring, raise it.
They come up fast and keep going — five to ten feet by August. A thick stand makes a real windbreak and a real privacy screen, which is a useful thing to get free with a vegetable.
Water matters in one window: late August through flowering, while the tubers are bulking. Miss it and you get smaller tubers. Our 2025 crop came through a Northeast drought, which is why those tubers run small — and why you get more of them per pound.
Deer browse the tops. Voles eat tubers left in the ground. Those are the only two animals worth worrying about.
Wait for the tops to die back and dry. Until then the plant is still sending nutrients down into the tubers — harvest early and you get a smaller crop that can taste bitter.
After that, the tubers keep themselves — right where they are, getting sweeter with the cold. Dig what you want before the ground freezes in, then again as soon as it thaws. Want to dig mid-winter? Mulch the bed heavily in the fall.
Take all the big ones and leave the rest. That's the whole system — the patch replants itself, better than you would.
In the kitchen
Raw, the flesh is crisp and white — closer to jicama than potato. Cooked, it goes soft and sweet with a finish that tastes like an artichoke heart. That's the flavor the English were chasing in 1841 when they turned it into potage à la Palestine.
Mandoline thin, ice water, drain hard. Lemon, good oil, flaky salt. The salad that converts people.
Halve, toss with oil, salt and a good squeeze of lemon. 425°F until the edges caramelise. Don't skip the lemon.
Simmer with onion and stock, a splash of vinegar, blend, finish with cream. Deeper than potato soup, and it freezes well.
Diced into brine with garlic, turmeric, ginger and cumin. A week on the counter, then the fridge. This is the one that wins over people who thought they couldn't eat sunchokes.
Half sunchoke, half potato. The potato gives body, the sunchoke gives flavor. Butter, and plenty of it.
All of it's edible — young shoots, leaves (hairy until they've cooked five minutes), flower buds, and the unripe seeds.
First time? Cook with lemon or vinegar, keep it to a few tubers, and give your gut a week to adjust. Then scale up.
If you want to go deeper
We grow and ship a single red-skinned strain — it's the one in every photo here. Vigorous, winters without help, yields hard in our ground. If you shop around elsewhere, here's what the names mean.
| Variety | Tuber | Why you'd pick it | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| White Fuseau | Long, straight, smooth white | Top yielder in Ohio State's 2024 variety trial — about nine times the tuber weight of the worst performer. Straight, so easy to wash and barely any peeling. | Moderate |
| Red Fuseau | Elongated, magenta skin | Early, nuttier, smooth-skinned. The one to grow if you eat them raw. | Wide |
| Dwarf Sunray | Small, smooth, thin-skinned | Runners under eight inches, tubers clustered at the stem so you can find them all. No peeling, works in a container. The safest first variety if you're nervous about spreading. | Very short |
| Stampede | Round, crisp, ~½ lb each | Prolific, early, very winter-hardy, big uniform tubers. Knobbier, so more waste when cleaning. | Moderate |
| Supernova | Standard | Tall and fast — for biomass, a screen, or a windbreak out of the patch. | Wide |
Trial reference: Ohio State University CFAES, Growth Dynamics and Yield Assessment of Five Jerusalem Artichoke Varieties (ANR-0170, 2025).
The rest of the planting
If you're planting something that comes back every year and never needs you, the rest of the property may as well work the same way. Everything below is what we actually grow and ship.
All of these are in the shop below, or on the full store.
Shop
Tubers ship in damp sawdust to keep them that way. Plant them as soon as you can work the ground; kept cool and damp they hold for months. Checkout and shipping are handled on our store — clicking a product takes you there.
Nothing matches that filter yet.
Out-of-stock items are things we grow and sell seasonally — check back, or see the full store.