If you have a small garden plot and don’t like digging it up every year, Three Sisters gardening may be for you!
This is a Native American gardening technique that is at least 1,000 years old and can be varied to climate conditions.
So, What Are The 3 Sisters?
The Three Sisters are corn, beans, and vined squash.
Corn is a heavy feeder and susceptible to high winds. The pole beans fix nitrogen into the soil and provide additional support for the corn. The squash also provides nutrients to the soil, but is grown for a living mulch and to keep the deer and raccoon out of the corn.
Check out the layout depicting the placement of corn, beans, and squash.
Corn – planting and growing
Corn needs other corn in close proximity around it for best pollination – no pollination and you get no kernels of corn. This is why you never plant corn in a single row. By planting corn in a tightly confined circle you will get optimum pollination of the plants.
Pole Beans – Gotta Have That Structure!
If you have ever planted pole beans, you know that they will just take over a climbing structure. The pole beans will bind the corn together providing maximum wind resistance. The flowers on the beans will also attract pollinator insects.
Squash For Moisture and Pollinators
The squash will help retain moisture in the ground and stunt weed growth by shading the area. Its flowers will also attract pollinating insects.
Getting Going
Ready to give it a shot? Awesome.
Plant:
- Corn first
- Beans about a week later (to give the corn a chance to get up and growing, and
- Squash a week after that
Let’s say you want one or two meals of corn on the cob for X weeks. Plant X mounds successively and you will have Three Sisters dining for as long as your growing season holds. Depending upon how YOU like to put your veggies up, you can plan for some work all summer or just work at canning the whole crop in a few days.
Also, for the most part, squash will winter quite well in a cool, dry area.
Here is a garden pot sunk in for watering. Six corn are planted around that pot. The beans are on the outside of the corn a week later, and 4 squash plants are planted a week later from the beans.
Don’t sweat this one, just have fun, and enjoy some sweet, sweet, all-American calorie crops.
Thank you, Bev! This is something I’ve been considering for a while but wasn’t sure where to start. I desperately want to grow something, but we’re dealing mostly with oak trees and acidic soil. The sunny part of my yard is no bigger than the space it takes to park a car, but I think this would work perfectly.
@ Single Mom, mix baking soda into your soil and when you water and you can adjust the acidity of your soil to a more neutral number. Also, you can plant lettuce early and radishes too can be harvested before the corn, beans and squash grow – 5 harvests from one little plot. :)
Another thing to consider is blueberry bushes – they love acidic soil. :)
You’ve just made my day! My grandfather had blueberry bushes — They were 8′ tall by the time I came along and had the biggest berries I’ve never seen since. My daughter’s been wanting to plant some kind of fruit, but everywhere I’ve looked they say that I’m limited to planting azaleas and rhododendron. Our house came with tons of both of those, but we’ve wanted something different.
Just remember that you need two kinds for pollinators, they want water too – basically a bog plant from what I understand. And they take about 8 years to mature, but you will get some berries right away.
Mine are two years old here and struggling with my alkaline soil, so I just lifted them and put them in buckets amended with more acidic soil and will try them again in another place in a couple of months. :)
After reading articles like this I really wish I had a green thumb, alas even a cactus would suffer with me as a gardener!
We’ve discussed a lot about 3-sister’s planting but even more about companion planting. We don’t eat enough squash to warrant planting the 3-stisters. We had poor harvest on some of our garden squares last year because we didn’t have enough knowledge on companion planting…I think :-) so I’ll be doing more study on that and still keeping within our rule of only planting what we’ll eat. We have a friend who just retired to a senior apartment complex and has planted her “garden” on her 3rd floor deck; using hanging baskets, potting tubs both round and rectangle :-) Her deck is about 4×8 so we tease her about having to push her way through her garden and to yell to the tenants below “watch the tomatoes”! For her apartment warming, we gifted her with a small dehydrator and an older model vacuum sealer. LOL
And today and tomorrow is a bit about companion planting! :)