Three Sisters

My hopi blue corn and haricot tarbais beans making happy music together

There is so much plant knowledge and so many plant varieties that were lost in our headlong dash towards uniformity, marketability and "scientific agriculture" that we no longer know how much was lost. Many of the varieties were lost in the last hundred years, about 93 percent of all vegetable varieties (not species but variations within that species) that existed at the turn of the century are gone. Most of them not because they weren't good, but because they didn't fit in with the new industrialized food schema, which required fruits and vegetables that shipped well, ripened all at the same time, were adaptable to the new chemical and mechanical agriculture and were uniform in shape and size. Flavors we now will never know. And we never paid a lick of attention to the fact that it was happening.

The knowledge eroded even more readily. Native American farmers used companion planting and fertilization techniques that were completely ignored when European farmers came to this land and made their straight rows of monocultural grains and vegetables. The knowledge that the European farmers once had about the importance of such things as growing hedgerows to promote pollinators was not regarded as terribly important by the intellectual elites who would later invent chemical agriculture in complete obliviousness to the reality of soil as a living thing itself. They created a form of agriculture made in the image of the era of Big Oil and Big Chem, but when the oil is gone we will find that we can't eat gasoline any more and will need the knowledge and diversity which we so casually cast aside.

The good news is that new varieties can arise from a new agricultural culture that embraces natural processes, local adaptation, local consumption and genetic diversity. All we really have to do is invent a new farm reality and those new varieties and that diversity will follow on its own, in time. The knowledge will arise too, only awaiting those who seek it and seek to put it into practice. Plants are very good teachers, they will quickly tell you that you are messing up if you actually take care to watch and listen. 

I have a garden plot that I wanted to plant with the traditional Three Sisters companion planting of corn, beans and squash. Except I didn't really see the point to the squash much. The corn and beans I understood, the beans climb up the corn and beans don't take nitrogen out of the soil that the corn needs (and over the long haul adds nitrogen to the soil too). I already have a container with acorn squash in it and another with lemon squash which I companion-planted (experimentally) with sunflowers. In the Three Sisters plan the squash is supposed to act sort of like a living mulch and the corn and beans are supposed to shade the squash. Well I figured, I already have mulch on my corn and beans, and I have enough squash planted already. 

Well it turned out that I should have planted the beans about a month after the corn because these beans grow faster than the corn. I wound up having to put up poles and strings for the beans to climb up, to distract them from clinging to the corn. Next time I might hold off a month before planting the beans. They were both flourishing however, and if I am allowed to speak unscientifically I think they like being together. They certainly seem very happy. 

And then I got to thinking about the varmits. ;) I have already had problems with squirrels digging up the melon patch looking for their nuts, and we have raccoons in this area. And I hear tell that raccoons love to eat corn. So I started hacking down some prickly vines (pricking myself many times in the process) to act as a sort of organic barbed wire to protect my corn. Raccoon feet are very sensitive. So sensitive in fact that they don't even like walking on the more subtle prickles of... squash vines. ;)

And so I came full circle to what undoubtedly the Native Americans figured out long ago. Even though the prickles of squash aren't that intimidating to humans, they suffice as a pest deterrent especially to the sensitive raccoons. And so I hurried out to the yard to get some squash in on the sides of my corn and bean patch, a bit later than I would normally do for planting squash, and I didn't plant the more suitable lemon squash (big leaves and vines, more sprawling) but the slightly less suitable but more useful for me acorn squash. I really like winter squashes better. Still, I hope that by the time the corn becomes raccoon-enticing, the leaves and stems and vines of the acorn squash will act as a deterrent to them setting their sensitive little tootsies on my corn bed. And so now through practice and thinking ahead to future problems, I understand why all three were always planted together. ;)

And, completely "unscientifically" of course, I believe that they feel the familiarity of long centuries of being planted together. I think they know, that their fates were intertwined a couple thousand years before Columbus ever set foot on these shores. I am glad I could bring them back together again as it should be.