Johann's Garden

Now, how to eat them! If  you're into permaculture or perennial veggie gardening you've almost certainly heard of sun chokes (or Jerusalem artichokes if you prefer).  In fact, you may already be growing them.  In terms of quantity produced relative to effort expended sunchokes can be an incredible crop.  However, a large harvest isn't enough; you must also know how to use it.   Many people find domestic selections of sunchokes to be fairly palatable (unless of course they grow a less tasty cultivar with a wild piney flavor).  The real challenge is figuring out how to eat them without turning one's guts into a gas factory.   Wait!  Don't go anywhere just yet.  Keep reading. Eating sunchokes:   There are three primary ways to enjoy sunchokes with endless variations in each category. 1. Raw - sunchokes make a tasty snack in the raw form. However, it's important to limit raw intake at any given time because their primary stored carbohydrate is in the form of "i

The following assumes a 50% chance that any given seedling will be male or female in plant species with separate male and female plants. Note: There may be genetic issues within a specific species which result in a higher percentage of seed maturation from one gender or the other, but as a general rule it's safe to assume that a randomly selected species will be equivalent to a coin flip in terms of whether the resulting seedlings will be male or female. If you plant one single tree you have: a 50% chance of it being male a 50% chance of it being female If you plant two trees you have: a 25% chance both will be male a 25% chance both will be female a 50% chance you will get one of each gender If you plant three trees you have: a 12.5% chance all will be male a 12.5% chance all will be female a 75% chance you will get a mix of both genders If you plant four trees you have: a 6.25% chance all will be male a 6.25% chance all will be female a 87.5% chance you w

Google Rudbeckia 'Herbstonne'.  I promise you will find endless repeated statements about it being a cultivar of R. laciniata, R. nitida OR a hybrid of the two.  Never any written statement to justify why it's listed as one or the other or a mix of the two!  As I really like this plant I of course had to know what its real identity is.  I began to dig through the plants.usda.gov database where I saw pictures of R. nitida and realized R. 'Herbstonne' really looks nothing like it (to a plant geek at least).  Then I realized that R. laciniata actually further breaks down into multiple varieties with a good bit of morphological variation, but this particular database didn't have enough info to learn how to differentiate them.  Next, Google took me to eFloras.org which is home of plant identification keys for just about any plant you could think of.  The level of detail in the keys borders on overwhelming even to a plant geek.  I had to go back to Google for help und