I’m glad I don’t have to live on my garden harvest. Each year I double dig and hack away at black walnut roots that are snaking their poisonous way in. Yet I always miss a few and watch in dismay as my exuberantly flowering plants sadly droop and succumb to the conquering juglone, the black walnut’s brilliant survival strategy. Moles burrow under the fence I buried 8 inches down (why didn’t go to 10?) offering an underground highway for voles that delight in my tubers. Squash bugs, Japanese beetles, flea beetles, leafhoppers feast on what’s left. “Yum, thank you, Lavinia,” I can almost hear them buzz.
There is one plant that never fails. I should have known better. After all, I had the same thing happen when I lived in NJ. But somehow, I thought since I have so many challenges, maybe the Jerusalem artichokes, also called sun chokes, would not reproduce in the same way. And their flowers are so pretty. It was 3 little plants. The vendor at the flower market seemed embarrassed to sell them to me. “You know they can be invasive?” “Oh yes, I’ve grown them before,” I assured him.
Three years later, I’m hauling buckets of them out of my garden. Thing is, as delicious as they are, Jerusalem artichokes are famous for one thing. Gas. The inulin in the tuber is great for your gut microbiome (and apparently none of us have been feeding our microbiomes properly and now need to supplement it.) But it also turns anyone who eats these innocuous little fellows into a fart machine. No joke.
Like anything, there is a hack around it. Lemon, vinegar, any kind of acid cooked with the tubers neutralizes the gas. So when I dug up another 3 pounds of tubers I decided I should make some relish with tons of vinegar, which is apparently a Southern staple. Brining, chopping, sterilizing jars, making the syrup had me cheerfully singing like a modern homemaker. Then the jars were to be reinserted into the boiling water for 25 minutes. I carefully lowered the jars. And then I heard a crack. NOOOOOO!
I got the jar out of the bath and the bottom fell off. An entire quart of artichoke relish exploded all over the stove, onto the burners, under the burners, onto my clothes and the floor. It took almost as long to clean up as it took to make the relish. My only consolation was that there were still another two quarts in the bath.
I try to find the lesson in everything. My sister suggested that this happened because I had felt I SHOULD do something with the artichokes. “That always happens to me when I feel I “should” do something I don’t want to do,” she said. I wonder if in this case it was a “shouldn’t.” I shouldn’t have planted the artichokes in the first place. But then again, they are my most successful crop. Except for the turnips I planted one year. But that’s another story.