One Persons Waste is Another's Treasure!

Sunchoke is a fast-growing and continually spreading perennial plant. Sunchoke can be cultivated annually for it’s stalks without tilling the soil or upsetting the vigor of the plant. Grown as an edible, it has properties similar to that of industrial hemp.

HempStone is testing local sunchoke stalk to determine the viability of use in buildings. While not grown at the scale of industrial hemp, it provides an interesting alternative to it’s row crop cousin.

Our sample blocks (below) turned out lovely - darker in color than our standard hempcrete blocks, these nonetheless performed similarly to hempcrete and prove that local, perennial Sunchoke is viable in construction.