Context: he Three Sisters (Spanish: tres hermanas) are the three main agricultural crops of various indigenous peoples of Central and North America. The crops are squash, maize ("corn"), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). Traditionally, several Native American groups also planted sunflowers on the north edges of their gardens as a "fourth sister".\1])#cite_note-1) In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis) for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.
Indigenous peoples throughout North America cultivated different varieties of the Three Sisters, adapted to varying local environments. The individual crops and their use in polyculture originated in Mesoamerica, where squash was domesticated first approximately 10,000 years ago\2])#cite_note-2), followed by maize and then beans, over a period of 5,000–6,500 years. European records from the sixteenth century describe highly productive Indigenous agriculture based on cultivation of the Three Sisters throughout what are now the Eastern United States and Canada, where the crops were used for both food and trade. Geographer Carl O. Sauer described the Three Sisters as "a symbiotic plant complex of North and Central America without an equal elsewhere".
by Salty_Strain3313
4 Comments
If you think that’s cool, in the Western Great Lakes my ancestors maintained massive raised bed agriculture in sandy marshes and swampy forests above the natural northern maize-growing limit of the region. The soil was regenerated with the abundance of organic muck we have everywhere, leaving the earth MORE fertile than it was before our ancestors even started farming it. Extensive expirimentation with biochar and soil chemistry has been shown through archeology. We find field complexes built in strategic areas and then left unused in anticipation of climate oscillations.
Each parcel of the larger ridged complexes was individually managed and worked, no bosses, kings, slave drivers, or whips. More than enough food was grown to support everyone so the preserved excess was buried all over the place in storage pits where anyone could freely access them if needed. Yet the culture was so anti-authoritarian that even with the large population this supported and all of the surplus, no usurping caste ever emerged to take control of it all and dangle it over everyone’s heads to coerce them into a lifetime of labor (sound familiar?) They had developed a socioeconomic reality so complex and diffuse that it diluted power, authority, and accumulation to the point where they posed no danger of authoritarian spillover.
If you think those little corn mounds are a neat sign of indigenous intelligence then you clearly have some deconditioning and learning to do. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe it’s because those past years I’ve encountered enthusiastic three-sister planters everywhere around me, but personally I think the opposite – I think it’s overrated. I’ve tried it for several years and it’s clearly a technique for people who have to do a lot with little – I can totally see it as one of the best methods for slash and burn agrictulure or maybe for someone who moves location every 5-10 years because of soil or game depletion, it’s also well suited for people who base a very large proportion of their diets on hunting and gathering.
BUT if you have good bonity stabile soil, it is a massive vaste of both space an energy. Space because it is rather complicated to keep the crop growing where it is supposed to grow – that’s mostly the fault of the squash. From one 1 m^(2) I can get a muchh higher yield of each of the individual crops when I plant them separatelly. The enrgy loss is even more severe – the amount of time you have to tend a three sisters field is incomparable to the time used for a single crop field. The squash needs to be tended constantly else it invades neighbouring fields, it also has a tendency to suffocate mayze and beans if untended (rookie mistake, but I still don’t have to do that if there is no squash or if there is nothing other than squash), the beens too + harvesting a three sisters field eats up more time because you have to be very careful and attentive about what you are doing. Getting bean plants entangled into squash plants is as annoying as stepping on your squash you haven’t noticed because of the beans growing tall on the mayze.
If you have time and don’t have manure or even compost at hand, three sisters is great. But if you have good soil and manure, or maybe even if you don’t need to move from your area at all, crop rotation is much more productive and comparativelly regenerative. Three sisters deplete soil slowly on an annual basis because the plants complement each other, but proper crop rotation does the same just on a 3-4 year basis – even if you include a non-harvesting year into the rotation, I am almost certain a crop rotating field gives larger average annual years than a three sisters field.
Basically – three sisters is good for your back yard when you want squash, mayze and beans just for your occasional summer lunch. If you want larger yields it’s comparable or even slightly less suited than crop rotation. If you are a farmer, crop rotation is clearly better because it requires less energy imput. I don’t even know if there is any machinery which could handle large three sister harvests quickly.
The number and variety of domesticated plants that came from the New world always shocks me. Potatoes, maize, tomatoes, chiles, so many things that we recognize as staples of modern agriculture and cuisine just weren’t an option pre Columbian world.
Then on the animal husbandry side, the most successful is the dumb turkey.
In a few centuries, corn went from a crop endemic to the Americas to a staple worldwide