Overview of Planting Three Sisters Seeds

It’s that time of year. That time of year when we should be thinking about planting Three Sisters, so the question is what is the Three Sisters? Three Sisters is a planting technique evolved by indigenous peoples probably thousands of years ago in the Americas. These planting methods were featured heavily in the wonderful book “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This involves planting beans, corn and squash in the same planting area which then enables the beans to use the corn as a climbing mechanism and the purpose of the squash is to shade the ground around the planting area, with those large squash leaves. Wonderfully, we also get a lot of food from what we planted. I’ll give you a specific example in the small third of an acre garden that I’m tending at the moment, where I came across, a fairly denuded Hugelkulture bed here (more information about Hugelkulture in a later blog piece), which is 6 feet by 16 feet roughly. A lot of the soil had washed off the wood, that was the center of the Hugelkulture and so it needed to be renovated. There was a pile of very heavy clay soil nearby, so what I did basically is use that soil to rebuild the Hugelkulture bed and then basically planted in there as I mentioned earlier; beans, corn and squash into that soil.

The photograph below is of the Three Sisters Hugelkulture bed mentioned in the paragraph above at around 3-4 months in. There is a video version of it which can be viewed here.

What A Pleasant Surprise!

None of us really knew what was going to happen, because we knew that the soil was very, very clay-heavy. However, we got an amazing crop. In fact, it was much, much more amazing than we thought it might be; let me try and put that into some numbers. So for instance, I planted 20 butternut squash seeds, they were South Anna open-pollinated seeds. Not all 20 germinated we did get three or four plants that actually germinated. But from that three or four plants we got 13 wonderfully sized butternut squash, which are a Winter Squash so they keep providing food, if stored well, into the next year; the harvest by the way was in early November 2022.

So let’s talk about the beans and corn. Regarding the beans we probably planted about 60 seeds and it was really difficult to count the amount of bean plants that we got because they were close together and mixed in with the with the corn in the sense of growing up on the corn. However, we got a lot of beans I this was a small white bean called Irene’s Glass very, unique bean in actual fact, bit like a small Navy Bean. I like to leave beans to dry because at that point they become both seeds and food, obviously.

The corn we grew was a fairly rare Hopi Blue corn from Kearns Canyon. We were entrusted to grow it out by a young Seed Steward called Stephen Smith. It was whilst we were growing out for the Roughwood Seed Collection that we first Stephen. He now has his own seed enterprise and we were delighted to purchase some seeds from him at TheDevineBotanist.

All was going well with the corn, we planted probably around 40 seeds and we and we got 12 plants that yielded two ears of corn per plant. We were very pleased with this, however we are located very close to a creek with Nutria and we have two rather plump Squirrels in our gardens and we suspect one or other or both enjoyed most of the corn. Luckily we retained some of the corn to try again this year.

Lets look next at seed yields.

Three Sisters Seed Yields.

With the Beans: we probably planted about 60 seeds and it was really difficult to count the amount of bean plants that we got because they were close together and mixed in with the with the corn in the sense of growing up on the corn. However after harvesting the seeds in plastic buckets we had almost 2 gallons of beans so quite the amount, 60 seeds planted yielded thousands of beans harvested.

We also want to mention Fava Beans here which we view as a staple crop which grows over Winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Many view Fava’s as simply a cover crop, they are also a wonderful food resource. This could certainly be planted as part of the Three Sisters as it will grow even if planted in late Spring. Fava’s are a self-supporting pole bean so would grow next to the corn, not around it.

Next Corn: As mentioned above, most of the corn that did grow was consumed by someone or something: however, prior to this, it was growing well. If we estimate the kernel per ear count at 70 (a low number). We planted 40 seeds and had 12 plants growing with 2 ears per plant, 24 total. So lets multiply 24 ears x 70 seeds which gives us a potential yield of 1,680 seeds; so one more an exponential result. More info on corn seed yields here.

Then Squash: All the Three Sisters members have potentially wondrous yields. I planted 20 butternut squash seeds, they were South Anna open-pollinated seeds. Not all 20 germinated we did get three or four plants that actually germinated. But from that three or four plants we got 13 wonderfully sized butternut squash, which are a Winter Squash. We counted the seeds from one squash of one plant and there were 197 seeds. So if we low-ball estimate the rest at 150 per squash, that is 12 x 150 + 197 = 1,800 seeds from 20 planted!

Our Summary & Conclusion

Three Sisters is a very high yielding very long lasting food source. Both literally in terms of at what we grow when we get when we harvest it, but also saving it. In the case of Winter Squash this can be fresh into the following year. For instance, we harvested Winter Squash in early November and they’ll last until May or June of the following year. Also we can preserve them even longer by drying them. dehydrating them, in fact. That apparently was a very typical tactic food preservation of indigenous peoples. Also with dry beans, you can dry pretty much take any dried bean and cook it in the same way that you might cook pinto beans or black beans.

Okay, I’m going finish this blog piece now. Hopefully it’s useful for you. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think in the comments. Thank you for reading this to the end by the way.