This garden belongs to one of my fellow community garden gardeners. As a person, he’s a really great guy. As gardeners however, we are polar opposites. He buys everything from a garden center, his gardening techniques are chemical intensive and does not see the value in organic gardening. He also grows mostly flowers, which are very much a side activity for me.
He does however like to trade plants, and our gardening interests came together when I stopped by and offered him some of my Jerusalem Artichokes. I thought he might eat them, but he doesn’t like healthy food like that. Instead he decided to plant them, something that prompted an excited outburst of warnings from me that went completely unheeded. He said he liked the flowers, and had been looking for some to plant for a long time now.
So he planted them and, like he always does, doused them in chemical fertilizer. You can see the nearly 4 meter high plants, on the right side of his garden in front of the electricity pylon.
I went by in the fall while he was busy digging up the tubers in the ground, and warned him he better get as many out now as he could find, before spring came. I reminded him I warned him not to plant them. He pointed to another garden down the way, and said that gardener had asked for some, so next year they’ll be growing there too.
Oh, it’s hard not to feel just a little bit of schadenfreude with someone like that.
I planted some of these a year or so ago, on the edge of one of my raised beds. They got to 8 or 10 feet without any fertilisers! And I’ve spent the last year digging up enthusiastic little shoots that grow in the most inconvenient places – like the lawn. (I did remove all of the tubers after the main crop – so I thought).
I suspect I will have them forever.
They’re not hard to get rid of. Dig out all you can, leave them till the rest show, and dig them out individually. ~Mine get to about 8-10 feet then collapse all over everything. I’ve never had problems with them spreading.
I’ve had them for a few years now, and they are a lot of work in the spring to chase after all the volunteers. They do tend to come up in inconvenient places, like nearby beds, in paths and between paving stones. Their tendency is to want to spread a bit. When the time comes to get rid of them, I’m sure I’ll be able to, but I do think it’ll be a lot of work and probably take more than one year.
I think in many ways it depends on how big a garden you have. I have one that’s a little bigger than what makes it possible to tend every little piece of it regularly, so I really don’t have the time to come back every few days and hunt for more Jerusalem Artichokes.
Without fertilizer mine usually grow to about 2m or 6ft, sometimes 8ft. My neighbor’s grew last year to almost twice that. Whatever happens, I think he’s going to have a much harder time than me getting rid of them.
My neighbor 3 feet to the west of my community plot grows these. In my opinion, they are a very effective sunblock. I try to grow things that don’t need late summer light at that side of my plot. And in the meantime I try my best to dig deep and pull the entire plant when I weed the shots in my plot. I haven’t gotten around to tasting them yet. They just annoy me.