a plant that is easy to grow and produces abundant harvests its tubers
have a delicious nutty flavor let's look at growing sunchokes or Jerusalem
artichokes now we started our sunchokes plant from tubers that were bought at
a grocery store we just planted it in this small container that you see here
and within just a few days you could see the plants emerging from the tubers and
we are now going to be transplanting it into this wine barrel or a whiskey
barrel container you do need a lot of space for the plant to grow so I
recommend that you use a large container and growing in containers is easier than
growing this in the ground now water well and make sure that your sunchokes
plant always receives water as needed the soil mix that we're using is a mix
of some existing potting mix and I did add some sand to the potting mix because
tubers like sunchokes love having some sand in the soil
now 26 days since planting you can see that the plant grows very vigorously and
this plant although it's called Jerusalem artichokes is not related to
the city of Jerusalem nor is it related to the plant family of artichokes this
is actually related to the sunflower family plant this plant produces flowers
yellow flowers that look like sunflowers or even yellow daisies
and as you can see the plant is a vigorous grower
and what I like about this plant is that it is so easy to grow this plant just
get some tubers from the grocery store plant it and you're good to go
now as far as fertilizers go I added some fish emulsion and seaweed
fertilizer to this plant about two or three times while it was growing it
doesn't need a lot of fertilizer I just made sure that I used a good mix of
compost and sand for the potting mix with some perlite for added drainage and
you can see that the plant has become so tall now and this plant grows to over
ten feet and you can see here the plant is a vigorous grower again these stems
are pretty thick the leaves are growing well and we did not get any flowers on
our sunchoke plant but you can see yellow flowers for growing sunchokes you
will get some beautiful yellow flowers as well so this plant is also a very
good-looking plant and the growing season for the sunchokes plant is quite
long and it gets very tall so what I was trying to do is minimize the size of the
plant so that it grows more like a bush rather than just keep growing tall so
I'm gonna be pruning some stems here as you can see by pruning the stems I'm
limiting the size of this plant so that it's more manageable and make sure that
on hot sunny days your sunchokes plant is well watered the tubers need a lot of
water to form and you need to make sure that they don't get dried out now make
sure that you are growing your sunchokes plant in a
location that receives about six to eight hours of Sun every day this plant
loves sunlight and thrives in sunny and warm conditions you can see some damage
on the leaves probably done by some insects and I did not really bother
spraying this plant at all simply because the damage wasn't that
significant and 150 days since planting you can see that some of the tubers are
actually visible on the top part of the plant and this is usually a sign that
the plant is ready for harvest but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let this plant
grow for some more time and add some potting mix on top of the tubers so that
they are not exposed to the Sun and this lets me grow the plant for a few more
days at least a week or two before I can harvest the tubers and at 162 days since
planting they are now ready for harvest we're gonna be just pulling out our
plant and remember that the tubers are formed around the plant and it's best to
keep your pot on a tarp so that you don't waste any potting mix and you can
see here these tubers lovely looking tubers the sunchokes
or Jerusalem artichokes they're just very prolific growers and I was really
surprised to see how many tubers they produce the tubers look exactly like
ginger a little bit on the plump side though
little bit thicker and the best thing about the sunchokes
plant is that the carbohydrate that the tuber store is in the form of inulin
and not starch which means that it's very beneficial for people that have
diabetes the carbohydrate doesn't break down as quickly as starch and the
sunchokes is very similar tasting to a potato but it has a nuttier flavor it
actually has a very unique flavor when I first tried sunchokes I felt that this
was something like a cross between a potato and a taro root and it also comes
very close to the taste of a taro root but still has this distinctive flavor
that's not found in taro root so very unique vegetable to try growing and
eating
you can see here we are harvesting a lot of tubers from just this small sunchokes
plant and I was really surprised to see how many tubers this plant could produce
for the space that it was growing in I wasn't really expecting so many tubers
and here you can see the harvest beautiful looking tubers now they say
that if you wait too long you wanna have too many hairs on the roots of the plant
but as you can see here this was the perfect time to harvest the tubers
they're nice and big tubers and they're quite a lot of tubers and I usually do
not measure or weigh my harvest but in this case I'm gonna do that you can see
that we have almost four and a half pounds of sunchokes harvested from a
single plant and that's quite an abundant harvest now we're going to be
washing our Sun chokes very well it's a little tricky to clean them because the
dirt actually goes around the tubers
and by rinsing them like what you see here you'll be able to clean them up
very well and once the tubers are clean this is how they look like
and as you can see here they look very much like a ginger root extremely
similar and here you can see again that's a bountiful harvest now let's
look at a sunchoke soup recipe these are the sunchokes that we harvested as you
can see here and what we're gonna do is we are gonna cut these sunchokes into
smaller pieces and you can see here they look beautiful from the inside they're
white and fleshy sunchokes we're gonna be cutting all these sunchokes into
these small pieces
as you can see here they look beautiful all the tubers are looking wonderful and
our next step now is to cook them we are gonna be putting this in a pressure
cooker you do not have to pressure cook it you can even cook it in an open pan
and make sure that they are well cooked
when the pressure-cooked sunchokes this is how they look like the idea of
cooking them earlier is to make sure that they do not have any skin on them
the skin can be removed now some people prefer to eat the skin so it's up to you
if you like eating it with the skin you can go ahead and eat it with the skin
for our recipe here we're going to be putting this and some cold water so that
we can remove the skin of these sunchokes
and here you can see that we are peeling the sunchokes and it was a little
overcooked in my opinion so I think instead of pressure cooking these
sunchokes it might be a better idea to just cook them in an open pan and you
can still puree them into the soup that you wanna see here and we are removing
the skin here if you want a nuttier flavor and if you like eating the skin
just leave the skin on and your soup will still taste very good
and here you can see we have peeled our sunchokes now and now what we are gonna
do is take some oil and add some cumin seeds as you can see here let the cumin
seeds sputter a little bit and then add some freshly cut onions these are onions
from our garden we harvested onions last month
cook the onions till they become translucent so it takes about a couple
of minutes and now let's add the tomatoes and mix it in all we are doing
a shallow frying the tomatoes and the onions and after a few minutes you can
see that the onions and tomatoes are cooked and what we're gonna be doing now
is taking two cups of water in our blender as you can see here we've
measured two cups already and we're gonna be adding these onions and
tomatoes that we just stir-fried and to this we are going to be adding
our Sun chokes the Sun chokes that we peeled and kept ready
blending it for some time the sunchokes get blended very quickly but we also
have added the onions and tomatoes so we're gonna be blending this for just a
few seconds and as you can see here our sunchoke soup is ready this is a very
delicious soup I was pleasantly surprised at the taste of sunchokes
it adds a really nice nutty flavor to all the dishes that you use it for and
this sunchoke soup is absolutely delicious so there we have it folks I
hope you enjoyed this episode of growing sunchokes or Jerusalem artichokes do put
in a comment below if you have tried growing this plant variety in your home
garden or did this video inspire you to try growing this plant variety don't
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subscriber we'll see you again soon happy gardening