2026 planting time

[squirrelitude]

Planting time! Hooray!

This year I'm focusing on basil and hot and sweet peppers. I'm not going to grow any tomatoes, as I haven't gotten the kind of reward from them as I would like, and have such limited space. Some parsley, but mostly because I want to see if I can get parsleyworm caterpillars again. ^_^

I also planted more ornamentals than usual, as they're going directly into the ground in my neighbor's yard and so I don't have the space constraints: Tithonia, sunflower, strawflower, mallow, bachelor's buttons, four o'clocks, and love-in-a-puff (a good vine for the chain-link fence).

And a few seeds that probably aren't viable and where I wanted to just use up the packets: Miniature carrots, echinacea, columbine.

...I totally forgot to plant tomatillos. Getting on that.

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I dug up the remaining sunchoke tubers from my ~1m long container garden tub and got about 5 kg of tubers. I wasn't expecting that much! These are from a few tubers I had planted in May 2024. I completely excavated the tub and filled it back in, and there were tubers all the way at the bottom and crammed into the corners. I got as much out as I could and I'm hoping there aren't any viable tubers left, because my hope is to grow the next batch from seed I saved, rather than from tubers.

...I'm a little concerned, though, at the amount of rocks in the soil. I got some of the soil from someone who said it was clean soil (no lead) but I've never tested it, and I want to run some tests on it before I eat a whole bunch of unpeeled tubers that were grown in that soil. I'm going to get one of those perovskite-based DIY lead test kits and see what I can learn. (They're not intended for quantitative testing, let alone for soil, but I want to do some experimentation.)

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Sunchokes can produce a huge amount of tubers. However, in order to set viable seed, you need at least two different parent plants. Most of the time when you buy a bag of tubers, they will all be clones. I bought a bag of seedling white and seedling red sunchokes tubers. Now they are all over one corner of the prairie garden, from spreading tubers and also because they rain seeds everywhere. So check the grass around your planter. If you see baby sunchokes sprouting, you have viable parents; if not, you may have all one clone.

Re: Thoughts

[squirrelitude]

I got these tubers from my dad, and yeah, they were probably all clonal. But a lot of the seeds look filled-out and are probably viable.

I don't expect to see many sprouts around the planter in any case, though. I was pretty aggressive about harvesting the ripe seed heads.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

If the seeds seem viable, then sure, it's worth trying to grow them. *ponder* You could just stick them in the ground, but you could also roll 10 or so in a damp paper towel to see if they sprout.

[asakiyume]

Sounds like it will be glorious!