Three Sisters: Corn, Beans and Squash

by Natasha Chart

categories: Indigenous Rights, Plants, Policy, Soil

Published April 23, 2009 @ 08:21AM PT

Yesterday, the US Dept. of Agriculture made an announcement about their work on the expanded People's Garden at USDA:

... Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan officially kicked off the Earth Day event at the Whitten Building with Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Brings Plenty who performed a traditional song and planted seeds at a ceremonial Three Sisters Garden to celebrate American Indians' contribution to American agriculture. Merrigan led volunteers and USDA staffers in planting vegetables, herbs and flowers to complete the first phase of The People's Garden. Eventually, the garden will include organic raised vegetable beds, organic transition plots, an organic urban container garden, an organic kitchen pollinator garden, rain gardens and a bat house.

A Three Sisters Garden is a traditional garden consisting of corn, beans and squash that has been planted by American Indians for centuries. Stories of the Three Sisters refers to a tradition of interplanting corn, beans and squash in the same mound. It is a sophisticated, sustainable planting system that has provided long term soil fertility and a healthy diet to generations of American Indians. ...

My former botany teacher would be very disappointed in me if I could not still, cold, tell you a bit about why the Three Sisters planting is so damn nifty.

It's sheer luck that I found a photo with such a clear look at the leaves (thank you, Abri Beluga!), but if you're not familiar with these plants from experience (if you are, skip to the next paragraph), you can make them out in their respective layers and see what I'm talking about. Of course the corn has the tall, narrow leaves that stick up from the center. Next down, you can make out the bean leaves, in their arrow-shaped pairs that are the first you see as your eyes travel down the corn stalks. The squash leaves are lower down and spreading along the ground, broad and bumpy with scalloped edges.

When it comes to soil nutrients, the bean plants provide nitrogen through the symbiotic, nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in their roots. Corn is a heavy nitrogen user, so that comes in handy. All of them draw a different enough profile of soil nutrients that they don't hinder each other.

Then there's the structure of the plants. Bean vines need things to cling to so they can get high enough to reach the light when there are other plants around, while corn stalks make good beanpoles. The broad squash leaves overshade weeds, as well as cool and retain moisture in the soil.

One could also marvel at the nutritional complementarity for humans. The beans and corn give you all your essential amino acids, the squash provides a good number of vitamins. The beans and squash are also high in fiber and yield some fats. A diet with these crops as the centerpiece fed the Native Americans in North and Mesoamerica pretty well.

Before the disease epidemics hit (the earliest and worst of which were accidental*, see 1491 by Charles C. Mann,) they were reported by explorers to be tall and robust by European standards, where malnutrition and poor public health were common at the time.

Some early agriculturist, or agriculturists, figured this out after the development of the corn plant from teosinte - in itself a truly remarkable achievement - and their discovery fed, still feeds, many millions. It's a good tradition for the USDA to honor.

If you'd like to try planting the Three Sisters at home, check out Renee's Garden and their Three Sisters Garden Pack. It isn't that I've tried their seeds in particular, it's that they include Scarlet Runner beans, so I had to recommend them. Have you tried Scarlet Runners? They impart an incredible, smoky, BBQ sort of flavor to foods. They're also, I've read, a really excellent green manure.

I'll say no more about them. I'm still sad that I can't find delicious Scarlet Runners canned anymore, not even when I splurge and go to the very nice organic groceries. Must get a yard ...

* If the explorers had known what they were doing at first, they might well have done it anyway. But this was a long time before germ theory, when no one had any better explanation for disease than to suspect the supernatural, neither the Europeans nor the American Indians.

It might be that a disease epidemic that wiped out over 90 percent of the populations of North and South America, leaving the Inca so weakened that a handful of men were able to take over their whole country, was started by the accidentally escaped pigs of Hernando de Soto's expedition.

By the time of the Trail of Tears, it's obvious that diseases the Native Americans had fewer defenses against were being used as biological warfare agents. No one could possibly dispute that, nor would I think to excuse it. Though it seems now that the harried tribes the early colonists dealt with were a vastly reduced remnant of a continent that had been so thickly populated, numerous previous expeditions had been forced out.

The Pilgrims, for example, landed near a village that had turned into a spontaneous mass grave not too long before their arrival. They survived the winter because the former inhabitants had left behind a lot of things they weren't going to be using anymore. The surrounding villages weren't in great shape, either. And so it was that Europeans finally got a foothold in North America.

Anyway, read 1491 by Charles C. Mann, if you want to know more. It's all that and a bag of chips.

(Photo credit: Abri Beluga on Flickr.)