Cheapout on Gardening -- Three Sisters

This was by far my biggest success last summer. It's called the Three Sisters, and it comes from the Native American culture.  The idea is that the three crops are symbiotic, and all three do better as a result of being with the others.  I planted corn, beans, and squash all together in one half of my large raised bed.

• The corn uses a lot of nitrogen, but it provides something for the beans to climb, and provides shade for the squash.
• The beans fix nitrogen into the soil.
• The squash provides ground cover for the other two, preventing weeds from growing and also helping to keep the soil's moisture.

You need to plant the corn first to give it a little bit of a head start.  Once the corn is about 6 inches tall, you can plant the beans and squash.  I used pole beans and a variety of squash seeds (because I had a few seeds in each packet, and my then 3 year old dumped them all together.)

After about two weeks, they looked like this.

As I mentioned earlier, this is just one end of my larger raised bed.  You can see rows of tomatoes or eggplant just to the right.

A few more weeks, and here it the large bed, three sisters in the back of the photo.

We had a very chilly and wet spring and summer, so the tomatoes and peppers were off to a slow start.  The sisters are doing great.  Here's a closer look at the three sisters, below.

The corn was definitely knee high by the 4th of July.

Here you can see the beans hanging from the corn stalks.

And a spaghetti squash growing.

The tomatoes finally caught up, and we got more beans than we could have imagined.

And there we have it!  The three sisters were mostly successful for us.  We had a severe wind storm that blew over my corn stalks right as the ears had started.  I staked it back up, but it ruined the corn.  We did continue to get a lot of beans and a few random squash.  We had trouble getting anything to come of all the squash blossoms, so this year I will add a plant to entice more bees to our garden.