Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

Man, what a difference a day and a bunch of degrees can make! The temperature didn’t exactly shoot up, but it went from hovering around daytime zero, to around 10°C (50°F). This was one weather trend, predicted on the 15-day-forecast weather site, that I figured wouldn’t suddenly go south (it’s gotta warm up sometime), so I’ve been waiting for it, to the day, for a couple of days now. It’ll get steadily warmer for a week or so, than maybe drop a bit, but even if we get another BLIZZARD, the ground will have warmed up enough that new snow won’t be able to stick around for long. So, I do believe, SPRING IS HERE!!! I woke up to sunshine, and without even checking the temperature or confirming the forecast, set up a table outside the Milkhouse and out went the leek, onions and parsley for a little rapid hardening off. Getting them out to the greenhouse in a couple of days will free up a lot of rack space! Wandering around the field a bit, checking the melt-off’s progress, I poked around the edge of the Jerusalem artichoke bed. The ground was still fairly frozen, and had melted to clayey muck only in spots. Poking around in a soft spot at the base of one of the plants, I came up with a handful! First harvest! The tubers look beautiful, the ones in the front of the pic about marble size, the biggest in the back, like a golf ball. As seed stock, there’s going to be a ton from the 45 pieces planted last year. I didn’t end up harvesting any in the fall; now, I’ll get to for the first time eat ‘em!

The Jerusalem artichoke leaves died off in the cold a few weeks ago, not too long after flowering, and I’d kind of not thought about ‘em in a while (they’re right by the 26 rosemary plants that have to be potted and brought in at some point, maybe that had something to do with it—I’m trying to figure out how to keep the rosemary without putting them under lights…another little puzzle). Anyhow, I wandered over today and cleared away an inch or so of dark, cold soil to find…beautiful, big, bulbous TUBERS. I’ve been looking forward to this from the beginning. It’s always excellent to see a first-time crop come through! I didn’t dig deeper, but from this peek, it looks like my original stock of 45 pieces has multiplied at least six or seven times, well on the way to real choke production next season. I’ll harvest some soon and…eat them!

Sometime over the last few days, the Jerusalem artichoke have started to produce pretty yellow flowers. That’s interesting. Without all this warm, way-past-normal- frost-date weather, what would they have done? They did go in a little late… And why do they look so…familiar? A couple of minutes online and it’s apparent that flowering is optional, largely dependant on location and conditions. And, no wonder, they—Helianthus tuberosus, aka sunchoke, sunroot, topinambour—are close relatives of the majestic sunflower (Helianthus annuus). Small world…

Various garden experiments are going on here and there. The new oats and fall rye green manure cover crops are doing well. There are five or six tarragon starters, three divisions from a potted lovage, coriander seed dried on the standing plants… Several varieties of hot peppers have to be given a final performance check. And so on. One I keep noticing and promptly forgetting again is the Jerusalem artichoke, planted so long ago. They’re definitely tough. The fuzzy-textured leaves seem rather delicate and wilt alarmingly without water, but they’ve survived with little weeding and maybe one watering all season, and they’re looking happy now.

Another unusual characteristic, compared to almost all of the other veggies and herbs, is how ununiform they are, at least in this first year, with plants of all heights, ranging from around a foot to over three feet (30-90+ cm). There’s not much variation in leaf size, simply in…height. Well, JA’s supposed to be prolific—we’ll soon see when I check in on the gnarly tubers down below…!

Got around to putting in the Jerusalem artichoke! I purchased 45 of these somewhat gnarly-looking tubers, some whole, some cut up, from a small seed house—”chokes” aren’t an everywhere find, although I’m told they actually grew here in the backyard of the farmhouse in decades past. This should be an interesting new crop, a kind of potato substitute with a “nutty taste”. They’re perennial, so they went in a semi-permanent spot in the herb garden, there to multiply!