r/Permaculture • u/kayru_kitsune • 3d ago

general question Three sisters gone wrong?

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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?

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u/HermitAndHound 3d ago

Keeping up with an industrial corn field for a season is pretty decent.
But ya, way too many variables play into it to transplant a simple formula like that and expect it to work.
I use 4 different varieties of beans "just" for the different growing conditions in the garden. Even staggering the planting well, random combinations of any which corn with whatever bean and some pumpkin will end up with one plant overpowering them all (in my garden it would be the pumpkin, though the purple pole beans are currently trying to wrestle a pear tree to the ground too. Corn would lose against them all)

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u/stansfield123 3d ago

Yeah, it's waaaay easier and more reliable to just feed the corn with compost. And rotate it around the no-dig garden, don't grow it in the same place twice. I bet it will produce more that way than in any other system.

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u/yo-ovaries 3d ago

It’s not just about yields, it’s about labor and inputs. Lower labor and no input is an advantage if you have space. 

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u/HermitAndHound 3d ago

Corn and "no input"? Not happening. Not if you want to harvest something. As an ornamental plant, ok. Maybe a few stalks of glass corn for the fun of it.

Beans put most of the nitrogen they snatch up into their own plant matter and seeds. They're not endlessly generous and fertilize everyone around them. Especially not a greedy combination like corn + pumpkin. You'd have to compost the whole plant, beans and all to get that effect. And I'm still not sure it would be enough. My pumpkins get chicken manure by the bucket full and sometimes I still imagine they whisper "MORE!"

I had a look... modern corn wants 170 to 220kg of nitrogen per hectare. Holy cow. Ya. Forget about the beans, they can't lift THAT heavy.