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Anyone else ever find a surprise in their garden? 

Yes! Well, our surprises usually comes in our front yard. When we first moved here we put many different types of pumpkins on our porch for fall. We aren’t always the best at hauling our pumpkins off. Well, that year when they got old we just kicked them off the porch.   Behold! The next year we had a nice stand of volunteer pumpkins. We couldn’t bring ourselves to kill them so we put some mulch around them and nurtured them. We got some really neat pumpkins! We’ve done the same every year since and the pumpkins get weirder and weirder looking.  Each year one of our children has proclaimed the pumpkin patch “their garden” which has worked out very well. It’s a gateway into their own little garden patch that they will plant next year. All of our girls (besides the baby) are avid little gardeners and they all began in a volunteer pumpkin patch. 

I heard that there is a special light you can go out at night to find them with. They are SO hard to find because they blend in so well.

Yes, it's any kind of ultraviolet light ("black light"). You can get them for pretty cheap on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01A5KLUG2/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B01A5KLUG2&linkCode=as2&tag=httpwwwchanco-20 />

You can get smaller ones than that too -- they just don't light up as much area, or as bright. That $13 one is a pretty good middle of the road option.

Our area has lots of scorpions -- they really glow in the dark with a light like this. We actually bought the flashlight for scorpions. Its use in the garden was an added bonus.

My oldest daughter has a pretty large garden (she does most of the gardening around here) and we were just out there a couple weeks ago picking off the tomato hornworms (wearing nice thick leather gloves so I don't have to feel the "squish" of the worms) and dropping each one into a bucket of water with a couple drops of soap in it (to facilitate drowning).

It's best to catch the critters before your plant is half gone. They are masters of camouflage though. Without the "blacklight at night" technique, it's hard to get them all.

I have never had Jerusalem artichokes. What are they like?

I think they are actually weeds but the roots are edible - dense and high caloric . When the bolsheviks were starving the Ukrainians back in the 1930’s , they stole all of their harvests , especially all of the potatoes . Apparently the Jerusalem artichokes were wild so the bolsheviks didn’t steal them or dig them up and many Ukrainians survived on them . There is a problem with storage however - I leave them in the ground until just  before the first frost and put them in buckets and cover them with sand - weird , I know but it’s the only way to keep them.the plants also have pretty yellow flowers at the end of August . Mine are about 6 feet tall.
Actually they taste good , but are pretty gassy! I think it’s a common complaint . I look at them as survival plants . They just grow and grow like weeds