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These roots, like small potatoes with
knobs on, have nothing to do with Israel.
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When New York was New Amsterdam, a
colonist from the village of Ter Neusen sent tubers home to his
gardening vicar in 1613, and Pastor Hondius raised the stock that
reached London about 1617 as `Ter Neusen artichokes', and became more
popular then than the new but relatively tasteless potato. They were
sold as a novelty in seventeenth-century London, and Ter Neusen became
distorted to 'Jerusalem'. John Parkinson (1569-1629) named them
'Potatoes of Canada' in our first real gardening book, before Italians
in 1666 began calling sunflowers `girasole' (Girra-so-lay), which
started the usual explanation of the 'Jerusalem'.
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Plant them in January or February, first
digging in a barrow-load of manure or compost: eighteen inches apart,
in six-inch-deep trowel holes with three feet between the rows. There
are about thirty plants in 7 lb. of tubers, enough to fill three 15-ft.
rows to give, with good manuring, about 56 lb. for eating, which is
roughly the weight of early potatoes you could grow in the same space.
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Ridge them like potatoes when they are a
foot high and in draughty gardens, where they make a useful summer
windbreak, put a post at each end and one in the middle of each row
with strings each side to hold the six-foot stems straight. In November
these are cut for corn-post material or to store, with the leaves
stripped off, to dry and harden as flower stakes. The tubers can be
lifted then like potatoes, but as they are hardy they are nicer if left
in and dug as they are needed until March.
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Their nutritional value, including
vitamins, is very much the same as that of a potato, but they have
roughly seven times as much as calcium. Their drawback is that we
should get tired of the smoky taste If we ate them as often as we do
the potato, which goes with everything and produces a heavier yield.
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In March dig the ground carefully, for
small ones are worse than left-in potatoes, but as American artichokes
are a kind of sunflower they miss virus, blight and disease, so the
stock lasts for years. Pick out the smoothest-skinned and least-knobbed
tubers of pullet's egg size for replanting. If any have creatures on
them looking like grey `greenfly' this is root aphis, their one pest,
and the remedy is to move the bed, replanting with creature-free tubers
washed in nicotine which is powerful enough also to kill their eggs.
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Those who only like artichokes
occasionally can leave the bed in the most convenient place, which is
less trouble but means a far lower yield, and treat it mainly as a
source of compost material, digging up a few tubers when they are
needed. It can be killed out by cutting it four times a year, but two
cuts a season are tolerated.
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