Ideas in permaculture design…

Gardening with the sisters

Growing food is one of the core practices of the permaculture design system, and there are different ways to go about doing it. This technique has been proven through long use and it can improve yield of our home and community gardens.

Russ Grayson
PERMACULTURE journal

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Summer. Another warm day is starting as we walk into the garden. We look up and see the white of puffy fair-weather cumulus clouds against the blue of the sky. Forest ravens welcome the morning with their raucous call while tiny honeyeaters flitter about. A heron flies gracefully by, barely moving its wings.

A gentle breeze off the sea sways the fernlike asparagus and the leaves of the corn stalks. We see how the corn stands tall, the cobs concealing the bright yellow grain under their leaves. Below, beans are climbing up the corn stalks and the squash spreads its broad leaves across the ground to cover the soil. We stand and look and in doing that we realise that this is more than a mere garden. It is a reminder of how cooperation, mutual support and interdependence lead to abundance. With that thought we hesitate for a moment. It reminds us of something that someone wrote. Who was it now? Bill Mollison, yes, Bill the founder of the permaculture design system who told us how:

I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher.

The statement reflects Bill’s belief in the transformative power of gardening and its ability to foster deeper thinking and understanding of the world. If we adopt this philosophical side to gardening we see how each of the plants before us symbolises different aspects of life: corn for sustenance, beans for replenishment, squash for protection. Yes, gardens are more than the soils and plants that make them up. As Bill would have put it, those are the ‘visible structures’. The understandings, thoughts and insights they engender are the philosophical yield of the garden, the ‘invisible structures’.

Squash planted between the corn starts to spread over the mulched garden to cool the soil, retain soil moisture. and make effective use of horizontal space.

Origin

The combination of corn, beans and squash can trace its origin to South America, however it may have also been used by indigenous people in North America. Ideas start in a place and then spread. So it is that we who live far from South America can make use of this ancient planting technique.

The combination gets its name ‘Three Sisters’ because the plants support one another as they grow. The planting technique makes use of the principle of mutualism—mutual benefit through mutual support.

Climbing beans planted close to the growing corn will use the corn stalk as a trellis and provide the plant nutrient, nitrogen, to the growing plants through the presence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria on the roots of the beans.

Getting started

It is spring and the weather is starting to warm. So is the soil in our garden. We have already added compost to it as a starter for the seeds we are about to plant.

Now it’s time to plant the corn. The seeds go in at their at their recommended spacings. Sometimes, we start the first batch of corn for the season in propagation pots and replant it in the garden as the soil warms up, following our southern winter and spring.

Once the corn reaches about 15–20cm high, a climbing bean seed is planted about 10cm from each corn stalk. Being legumes, the beans improve the soil through the action of nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots. That benefits all of the three plant types in the garden. A couple weeks after planting the beans we sow the squash seeds between the corn stalks. Which squash you plant depends on where you are. My partner is planting cucumbers, a vegetable in the squash family of plants, the Curcubacae. We will not need many. One squash per cubic metre should do. As the vines spread to cover the soil between the corn and the beans they act as a living mulch, the shade cast by the large leaves helping retain soil moisture and suppress weeds.

Now, let’s stand back over the coming months and watch it all grow.

Let’s recap:

  • corn goes in first and provides a trellis for beans
  • as they grow, the beans climb the corn stalks and enrich the soil with the plant nutrient, nitrogen, that is used by all of the three plant types in the garden
  • the squash spreads over the soil to suppress weeds, retain soil moisture and cool the soil in hot climates and, like the other vegetables, it will eventually provide food for we gardeners.

Choose varieties of corn, beans and squash suited to your climate, soil and personal preferences. Space plants based on the specific growth habits of the varieties you choose. Time the planting of the sequence according to the growth rate of the plants. Monitor the plants for pests and disease.

Corn, beans and squash planted in sequence are a means of using the principle of mutual assistance to produce food in home and community gardens..

Gardens yield insight

What does the Three Sisters planting pattern tell us?

First, it demonstrates what author Helen Keller says: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” Sure, we can grow corn, beans and squash as separate crops and they will do well. Combine them into a planting system that enables cooperation and we get something that is more than the sum of the separate crops alone—an emergent, self-supporting system. To bring Bill into the picture again, he did suggest that permaculture is a philosophy of working with rather than against nature, and that it is the relationship between things in a design—like the mutual support each of the sisters brings—rather than the things themselves that matters.

Taking a step back for a broader view, we can see in the cooperation of the the Three Sisters planting pattern a model for human relationships and sustainable community.

Order is found in things working beneficially together. It is not the forced condition of neatness, tidiness, and straightness all of which are, in design or energy terms, disordered. True order may lie in apparent confusion; it is the acid test of entropic order to test the system for yield. If it consumes energy beyond product, it is in disorder. If it produces energy to or beyond consumption, it is ordered.
…Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual, Chapter 2.9, in which Bill discusses the concept of order in ecological systems and emphases that true order is characterized by beneficial interactions among elements rather than mere neatness or tidiness.

Do you have any tales of the three sisters to share?

PHOTOS: Author.
In December 2024 there was a plot demonstrating the Three Sisters technique in the vegetable and orchard area of Hobart Botanic Gardens.

Design tools…

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