abundant reproduction

i've been to the garden twice so far this weekend...yesterday evening and again this morning...yesterday was the usual every-other-day run to do maintenance on the garden and i found that one of the cowpea pods was ready to harvest for seed ( they are probably mostly too tough to eat already although there are some small ones yet)...i counted seventy-six pods which is twenty more than there were wednesday...i saw a few that will be ready to pick next time i go and it remains to be seen how many we can harvest...but i won't need to purchase seeds for next season and that is part of what this garden is about...self sustainabillity...i can see we will have absolutely no trouble sustaining the jerusalem artichoke population...more the inverse actually...robust isn't a good enough description...i went out there this morning to dig up one of the sunchokes for tubers to plant here at home for next season and it was an education...i expected somewhat more in the way of tubers than the red nordlands produced and i wasn't disappointed...i chose the plant on the northeast corner of the garden because it was one of the ones planted away from the main body of artichokes and it was shading a clump of eastern gamagrass that i wanted to get into the sunlight...i initially found sixty-six tubers in the area immediately around the plant, and i assumed that was it...while digging i had exposed some of the gamagrass rootsysem and i thought i might clear away a bit more soil and take some photos of it...in the process of doing that i found another jerusalem artichoke attached to a rhizome...i followed it along and found another half dozen tubers just beyond the gamagrass...another sweep of the area was in order and since the plant was on the corner of the garden i began digging back under the university lawn and found sixteen more under their sod...so...eighty-eight tubers from one plant ( and i can't really be certain i found them all )...a shade over eleven pounds worth in all different shapes and sizes ( they look a lot like ginger roots )...with twelve plants still left to harvest i stopped to do some math...if that eighty-eight tubers holds up as a ballpark average for the remaining plants there are better than a thousand tubers left in the ground...stunning...at least to me as a novice to jerusalem artichokes...i had one raw with lunch...not bad if you don't mind bland...they would do well in a salad...haven't tried cooking any yet...more on that later