Bean Harvest

I went to the garden in the sunshine this afternoon when I could count on my bean plants being dry, and look what I found hiding between the leaves! This is my first harvest of snap beans this year. I have one row of each variety. The yellow/purple one is Dragon Tongue, a heritage variety with long, flattish pods that taste buttery when cooked. The green with faint purple stripes is Thibodeau de Comte Beauce. I have not eaten these yet, but they look delicious.

What is everyone else eating from the garden?

Summer storms

Strong winds and rain pummeled the garden on August long weekend! The wind must have come from the south as the corn is all tilting northwards.

I'm not sure onions need quite this much moisture! In all the combination of frequent rains and sunny days without too much heat have been good for the garden. It's just that you can have too much of a good thing.

Three Sisters

The Three Sisters are Corn, Beans and Squash, planted together in companion plantings, often with sunflowers too. I heard about Three Sisters first as an anthropology student. This was the traditional style of agriculture that sustained people all over this continent, from the Iroquois Confederacy of nations to the Hopi and Zuni in the American Southwest, all the way to Mexico where corn was first domesticated. The idea of the Three Sisters was planted as a seed in my mind at that time.

When I found out I could get a community garden plot, the seed of the idea sprouted as I looked into local sources of heritage seeds, grown from open-pollinated crops and saved by farmers over the generations. With a sunny community plot, I could finally indulge my fantasies of growing crops that require full sun! I wanted to grow the Three Sisters as an experiment for a few reasons.

Over the centuries through saving the seeds of plants that grew best in local conditions, Aboriginal farmers pushed the limits of their climates and created varieties of corn that could grow further and further north. The Buffalo was a more abundant source of nutrition in the northern plains, but the Sioux nations in North Dakota grew the Three Sisters for many years before the colonists came. One reason for growing heritage varieties of traditional crops was to honour those Hidatsa and Mandan women who fed their communities from the land in this way.

I also loved the idea that many of the nations that grew Three Sisters had a strong role for women in community life. Many of the Northeastern societies were matrilineal and matrilocal. Clan membership and hereditary titles passed through the mother's line, from one man to the son of his sister, and the clan mothers were very powerful in the community. Women grew up and remained in the same areas and tended the same fields their whole lives, with their husbands coming to join their household. It was the farm that anchored the community, through the work of the women. I wanted to be part of this tradition of strong women keeping the community together.

I also wanted to garden in a way that would benefit the environment. Companion planting is one way to allow one plant to help meet the needs of another. With the Three Sisters, the beans add nitrogen to the soil to feed the corn. The corn grows tall, allowing the beans to climb up and reach the sun. And the squash vines grow along the ground, covering the soil with their broad leaves, preventing weeds from growing and shading the roots of both corn and beans from the hot sun of late summer. This combination is the ultimate companion planting for North American gardens. And the plants that grow together as companions are also eaten together - corn, beans, squash and sunflower seeds together make a nutritious meal with complete proteins.

This year I am growing a combination of different heritage varieties that likely would not all have been grown together traditionally, but each sounded fascinating:
Mandan Bride corn - a multicoloured variety used for flour or fall decorations
Bleu Coco beans - a French heirloom that is reputed to taste wonderful as green beans or as dried beans
North Georgia Candy Roaster squash - doesn't that sound delicious?
All are from Heritage Harvest Seeds in Carman.

As it turned out, my Candy Roaster squash had poor germination, so only two of the plants are that variety. All the others are miscellaneous plants from the nursery. I also found that the Blue Coco beans were not sufficient for 16 hills, so I added some Helda pole beans from Lindbergs.

The first shot shows the corn and bean hills in late June when they were just getting established. It was hard to imagine they could possibly need as much space as they had. The second shot shows the effects of several weeks of sun and rain in equal measure. Interwoven together are corn stalks, bean flowers, tendrils of squash and some volunteer dill courtesy of Gauchers who had this plot last year.