You may have seen my previous posts about “The Three Sisters”, I’ll attempt to explain what I’m talking about and give you some history behind the technique and why I like this idea.

I learned about this method of companion planting from one of the fellow gardeners that I work with. He learned about it from a book called Notes on a Lost Flute: A Field Guide to the Wabanaki. In the book, among other things, I learned about the Three sisters and wanted to try it myself.

There are three components – Corn, Beans, and Squash. The corn acts as support for the beans to climb, the beans fix nitrogen into the soil for the corn, and the squash provides ground cover to hold in moisture and cut down on weeds. In addition, when eaten together, the food makes a complete protein.

You start off by planting 4-6 corn seeds in a 3 foot wide mound. Once the corn is 6 inches or so, plant the beans and squash. From what I’ve seen with my mounds, the corn should be about 12 inches before planting the rest. It’s also best to soak the corn seeds for 24 hours before planting. I tried soaking and not soaking and the corn seeds that were not soaked are about 2 weeks behind the ones that were. On each mound, inside the circle of corn I half buried a dark stone about the size of a softball. The stone absorbs the heat during the day and keeps the seeds warm at night, the rock seemed to work out well in my garden.

I’m trying a few variations this year just to see what works. All of the mounds have corn in the center, but I planted peas on some mounds and pole beans in the other. I also varied the ground cover portion, there’s various cucumbers, butternut squash, yellow squash, watermelon and pumpkins. I tried to keep the squash family of plants separated by cucumbers to cut down on cross-pollination, I’m not sure how a butternut-waterpumkin would turn out.

Here’s a picture of one of the mounds as of this morning.

I had to do quite a bit of weeding at first, but now that the leaves are spreading out, the weeds have been dramatically cut down. The beans haven’t started yet, but the peas and cucumbers are starting to produce. I’ve also had to add stakes to reinforce the corn after the beans took down a few stalks. This is why I recommended waiting a little longer before planting the peas or beans. I suspect that the squash could be planted with the corn seeds without any issues.

Happy Farming!