sunchoke city

i mosied over to the garden after i left work today and in looking around after i watered the green manures and cover crops i saw that this jerusalem artichoke ( top photo ) had completely died back so out of pure curiosity i popped it up and found that the plants seem to have had a good season...the root ball and the area immediately around it ( i did not go in search of tubers on rhizomes radiating out from the root ball though there surely are some ) produced thirty three tubers ( photos two, three, and four )...including the largest single jerusalem artichoke tuber i have seen in a few years of cultivating them ( bottom photo )...there are eight unharvested plants left out there ( and i reburied most of these in a cache pit in the bed ) so i am estimating somewhere between four and five hundred tubers all told...you can call that optimistic if you like but that could turn out to be a conservative estimate...these plants aren't labeled as aggressively invasive because they waste time not producing.