Rewilding My Lot

The Three Sisters Garden project has officially ended. The mounds have been dismantled, their soil moved elsewhere, and any remaining plant matter composted.

It was an interesting thing to try, but I’m not going to do this again next year. Nevertheless, I’ve been collecting notes along the way as to what I have learned while doing this for the first time. Here are those notes:

• Corn plants are prone to fall over. I could have planted the four corn plants on each mound closer together so they might help to hold each other up. Once they had started to grow, I could have piled up more earth around the base of the plants so that the roots were more anchored (apparently this is what farmers do here). I could have trimmed neighboring plants back so that they didn’t fall over to knock over the corn in a high wind. And if nevertheless the corn plants still seemed unstable, I could have done a more thorough job of staking them earlier than I did.
• Vegetables need more water than drought-resistant native plants. The rest of the garden here is designed to need virtually no supplemental water. Any watering of the Three Sisters mounds was done manually (using rain barrel contents in a watering can) and I am certain that I did not water these vegetables enough.
• I need to pay attention to insects that eat vegetables. I am trying to make this garden a balanced ecosystem, which means that it’s generally OK for insects to be eating my plants. For instance, caterpillars can grow into adult forms that are pollinators, or they can be bird food. However, if insects are eating plants that I wish to eat myself, that is usually a problem and I didn’t watch carefully enough for that.
• Corn plants should be planted as early as possible after the last frost. I could have planted two weeks earlier than I did, by shooting for the first week in March if the 10-day forecast seems safe from frost. If for some reason the prediction is wrong and there is a frost, it wouldn’t be a problem to repeat the corn seeding. Corn plants don’t like to be frozen or hot, so in this part of Texas there is a very narrow window to accommodate their growing season.
• For each of the corn, bean, and squash plantings, I could have planted extra seeds for redundancy. I did do some of this for the beans and squash, but didn’t think of it until one of the 20 corn seeds that I planted didn’t grow. Once the seeds have germinated, excess plants can be removed if they are too crowded.
• I would research varieties again. I chose varieties of corn, bean, and squash that were recommended by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service website and Master Gardeners in Guadalupe County. I would check into this again, perhaps paying more attention to the local Master Gardener experiences. I am puzzled by the fact that my bean plants grew and bloomed, but never produced any beans.
• I may or may not bury fish in the mounds again. I buried one trout in each of two of the five mounds as a natural fertilizer but I saw no correlated benefit in growth or harvest. By the time the mounds were dismantled the fish had completely disappeared. I doubt any harm was done, so it might be worth trying again.
• Pay more attention to soil erosion at the mounds. One attraction to me of this method of vegetable gardening is that it uses mounds of soil instead of having to construct raised beds. However, whenever there was a heavy rainfall, some of the soil was washed away. If I were repeating this project year after year, I would add more soil/compost to each mound each year and also hope that the established soil would become more healthy and mature. To have less soil erosion than I experienced this year I could perhaps have made the mounds bigger. Another option might be to place some sort of barrier around the perimeter of each mound, but then if doing that, why not just make a raised bed?
• Feed the soil between seasons. If I were going to repeat the Three Sisters project a following year, I would want to find a way to protect and enhance the soil of the mounds. Most likely I would choose a cover crop suitable for this region, such as some sort of clover, that could be planted in the fall to prevent soil erosion and weed development, and that would add nutrients from nitrogen fixing and from composting the cover crop plants back into the mounds in the spring.