HOW TO GROW SUNCHOKES / JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES IN CONTAINERS / POTS

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 happy gardening