Rewilding My Lot

Experimenting with a Three Sisters Garden this year has certainly been an interesting project. Most likely I will try this again for one more year at least, so that I can benefit from lessons I’ve learned this year and perhaps improved soil maturity, but beyond that I don’t know. Vegetables take more work and water than do native plants!

A Three Sisters Garden is a cooperative planting of corn, beans, and squash. All three are growing here and doing more or less what they’re supposed to, although I don’t think the harvest will amount to much.

My corn plants have grown to a height of 2-4 feet and ears are forming. I wrote before about how corn plants develop, because I realized that I was rather ignorant on that topic. For instance, I did not know that every single kernel on an ear of corn has to be fertilized independently. From what I read, we might be a week or so away from harvesting my sweet corn, but for now the ears still feel hard.

Most of the bean plants have grown long enough to climb up something nearby — either a corn plant or a stake that was placed to support a corn plant. There are a few flowers here and there.

Some of the squash plants have begun to flower. The plants themselves are small and not doing much to shade the soil (their supposed role in the “three sisters” cooperation), so I’ve left them at four plants per mound for now (the original plan was to cull to two plants per mound).