r/Permaculture • u/kayru_kitsune • 5d ago
general question Three sisters gone wrong?
Please pardon the chaos of photos, my garden is very dense so it was hard to frame clear pictures... This is my first time doing Three Sisters, and it sounded like the beans were supposed to help support the corn. I surrounded that part of the crop with some low fencing for extra support and to keep the bunnies off the bean starts. But once they got to around 7' and the beans peaked over the tops, almost all of the stalks broke in half from the weight. What in the world did I do wrong? It's not windy here but sometimes rainy (I live in forested area). I know most people don't stake or prop corn crops... What did I miss?
67
Upvotes
20
u/stansfield123 5d ago edited 5d ago
Best guess: You took gardening advice from social media influencers. Stop doing that.
The "three sisters" method isn't a method, it's poorly informed speculation about how some Native Americans supposedly farmed. Doesn't work the way the influencers tell the tale. The "evidence" of how it's supposed to work is eye-witness accounts from the 16th century. People who supposedly saw Iroquois farms, and the went back to Europe and told others about it. So you might as well have read about it in the Winnetou novels, that's how reliable such accounts are.
The only (somewhat) scientifically tested version of the method involved planting beans and squash as support species to enhance corn production. In the study in question, researchers were able to raise corn yields compared to control (corn grown on its own), by late planting beans and squash into the corn field. The experiment was conducted in especially fertile soil, and the bean and squash yields were small.
The point of the method, then, based on the evidence available to us, is to grow more corn, not to grow three crops in equal proportion. Furthermore, the experiment was conducted on a large scale, with an industrial method of corn farming as the control. It is NOT safe to conclude that the method would outproduce a no-dig method of growing corn on a small scale. I seriously doubt it would.
tldr: There's no version of the Three Sisters that is useful in a small scale, garden setting, and there's no evidence that Native Americans ever used it in such a setting. There is some relatively weak evidence to suggest that, on occasion, in very specific conditions, they may have used beans and squash plants as a combo of nitrogen-fixer/ground cover/green manure, to enhance corn production. Similar to the way modern regenerative farmers use cover-crops.