How many of you have heard of Jerusalem Artichokes? Not the Globe Artichokes that you can easily buy in the supermarket, but Jerusalem Artichokes?
No? No-one? Well you’re not alone. I hadn’t heard of them either until we were researching perennial vegetables.
As a vegetable they’re not very pretty. They are rhizomes but scrubbed off, popped in the oven and roasted they are incredibly tasty.
They don’t suffer from blight like potatoes and better still you can dig up all of the rhizomes each year and replant a small proportion for a HUGE harvest the following year.
So what’s the downsides I hear you say! There are 2:
- They are very expensive comparatively to buy first time around, but you have to balance this off against the fact that they’ll produce a crop year on year on year.
- They grow to at least 7ft tall so need a lot of support. They have tiny sunflower-like flowers at the top, but you’d never grow these giant plants for a flower that is so tiny.
In 2021 I bought 10 Jerusalem Artichoke rhizomes and by autumn, this was my crop. An incredible increase on what was planted.
We’re going to plant the largest and strongest of the rhizomes into a 100sqft raised bed so I should get 4 or 5 times this quantity of rhizomes next year to eat with enough to replant in another 100 sq ft raised bed for 2023.
We’re looking to add as many perennial fruit and vegetable plants to our garden as possible. Fruit is less of an issue as we now have apples, cherries, pears, raspberry, strawberry, currants, gooseberry, blueberry and many more.
Perennial vegetables are a little trickier so right now, we only have Jerusalem Artichokes and Asparagus. We tried Oca but found that they didn’t work as well for us. If anyone has more suggestions, please let us know.
What perennials have you found worked? Need to start a garden. Live in Ireland and things are getting worse here.
Richest country in Europe? My backside! Tell that to the people. No one can afford to buy a house and vulture funds buying up the new ones so they can rent them to Joe public more like. Further just giving the new ones to anyone off a plane it seems with an influx of taxpayers money that was never there for us.
Electricity bills going from 80-100 Euro bi-monthly on average to 500-1000 overnight. Food bills gone up too. Then they try to make out they’re helping us with handouts…of our own money. Totally a created scenario and they used the “recession”, climate change and Ukraine as the excuse.
I love to forage but recently the government passed a law that hedgerows couldn’t be cut back for 3 years. You would THINK that, that would be a good thing. No. They’re decimating the hedgerows. All the places I used to get stuff are either now dead or seriously damaged. Also they said there’s some disease in the horse chestnut trees. More decimation and from what I can see, more than half seem to have nothing wrong. Just rows and rows of trees gone. No chestnuts this autumn!
The vegetables you buy in the shops within days (like 3 days) are rotting.
They’ve already started to introduce GMO seeds to home gardeners in the U.S. which won’t produce seeds that’ll grow if you save them in many cases. And for those that do, once you plant them and they produce, those plants belong to the company that produce the seeds. Their “intellectual property” in legalese.
So what if they cross pollinate? Well it turns out they ALSO get to own those. The government here told the people that there are no GMO crops being grown in Ireland. Yet I know they’ve been growing GMO potatoes in Athenry and oil seed rape is GMO since the 70’s. That also affects our honey because the bees seem to love this oil seed rape.
So you can imagine what’s coming down the line. You’ve seen some of it already. Register your chickens, register your cattle. Register your garden.
Leo Varadkar bailed for a reason. He’s not putting his head on the chopping block. He’s also one of Schwab’s as it seems is most of Fine Gael. (Fine Gael used to be called the Blue Shirts…equivalent to the Brown Shirts in Germany. They started out wanting Nazism in Ireland.) Harris, the new “Taoiseach” of FG, you know what his nickname is? Tea boy – because he used to make tea for Frances Fitzgerald in the Dial as an intern. That’s pretty much his only qualification (even in education.) He’s completely useless and just does what he’s told. Useress Reader if you get my meaning.
Yeah. Enough said. Don’t go to war anywhere. Save your own first.
I don’t really know anything about the situation in Ireland but can help with perennials! Jerusalem artichokes are amazing with very high yield but you do need to be cautious about wind as they grow 8′ tall. Asparagus is very expensive to buy but easy to grow – takes a few years to get going but then crops easily. Nuts are amazing. An acre of sweet chestnuts gives the same food value as an acre of wheat without ploughing or reaping. The wood is almost rot proof too. Walnuts and hazelnuts are also worth it. Rhubarb is suer easy and very high yield – just put a bucket of manure on each crown in Winter. Gooseberries are easy to propagate as are currants (but need protection from birds). The biggest one is to plant an orchard – apples (cider, dessert and cooking), pears, plums and gages all produce masses of fruit. Plums dried make fantastic fruit cakes to replace sultanas.
Hope that helps