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

Despite the six inches (15cm) of snow on the big garden, fieldwork goes on. Today, I harvested about 30lbs (13.5kg) of Jerusalem artichoke out of the partially frozen ground, just to be sure planting stock is around over winter in case I need it. Since we don’t have a root cellar or walk-in cooler, storing crops in the ground as winter comes along is a risky but useful alternative. There’s still lots of carrot, parsnip, and some more chokes out there. Until the ground is frozen several inches or more down, it’s possible to harvest, although too much snow can make the whole thing a little crazy. Once thoroughly frozen, I’ve found carrots get killed off and thaw to mush, while parsnip and chokes withstand freezing just fine, staying alive and available again in spring. So far, though, everything’s still cool for digging. You can see the ice crystals in the frozen crust (above), but below that, it’s all cold, friable soil and plump, healthy choke tubers…

Compared to one month ago, the outline of the garden is pretty much unchanged, but a whole lot has gone dead and brown. Alive and well, there are lots of hardy brassicas, straining to grow in  the diminishing sunlight. And there’s still quite a bit in the ground: tons of carrots, a fair amount of parsnips, and a huge quantity of Jerusalem artichoke, all sweetening in the cooling soil…

Last seen simply soaring up above 7′ (2m), the Jerusalem artichoke recently exploded with flowers. Last year, flowers appeared on some plants, and I read that flowering chokes isn’t that common. You couldn’t tell from here… The plants continue to thrive, weathering pretty heavy wind recently with only a bit of a lean. I haven’t dug around to see what the tuber harvest may be like, but I expect it’ll be massive…

Jerusalem artichoke is the crop least fazed by this crazy, slow-growth summer of cloud and rain. The chokes have been in the ground since May, through the whole thing, and thrived through it all. This bed is right in the middle of the open field, but neither unchecked wind nor nasty hail has set it back. The tallest plants are approaching 8′ (2.4 m), a record for anything in this garden!

Heavily overcast, downright chilly, with rain threatening at any moment…still, a great first day at the market! In all the excitement, I forgot to take a picture of the stand as it was when we started, it looked good for a tiny spread of three trays… We sold out of mesclun and spinach in a couple of hours, while the Jerusalem artichoke, a veg that like as not had NEVER before been seen at this market, lasted all day but turned out to be a bit of a hit, with maybe 10lbs (4.5kg) sold! A bit of sage, thyme, oregano and chives rounded things out. This early in the season, the vendors were almost all crafts and prepared stuff—baked goods, cheese curd, maple syrup,…—and crafts, plus bedding plants and some fresh produce: storage potatoes, rhubarb, one stand with wild leek… And the traffic wasn’t huge, no surprise, especially with the weather. BUT, chatting with other vendors and regular customers for the first time after the winter was excellent! Really, connecting with people through fresh food at the farmers’ market makes tiny farming all make sense to me…

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…