Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Don't know about everybody else on this list, but I'm impressed with the 
quality of all this discussion. I haven't done Three Sisters myself tho we 
live in the SW. I have heard that there was a fourth Sister historically, 
Cleome which attracts beneficial pollinators.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 7/10/2008 at 1:30 PM Lynn Montgomery wrote:

>I have grown these three together, utilizing the Hopi method. Plant the
>corn, (blue corn or traditional white posole corn if possible), in
>circles,
>11 seeds per circle. The circles should be 8' apart in the row and the
>rows
>8' apart also. Plant the squash, (I use buttercup, which is an almost wild
>original maximus and gives the most useful fruit), in rows between the
>corn,
>also 8' apart and offset 4' each way from the corn circles. After the corn
>emerges, plant old fashioned cornfield beans. These beans are climbers and
>will twine around the corn, keeping it from lodging. The beans help feed
>the
>corn. These beans, which are available from many seed companies, give
>excellent green beans, and the dry ones are almost identical to pintos.
>The
>corn does shade the squash some, and cuts into yields a little, but here
>in
>NM, this is not a bad thing. After 2 fruits have set, prune any subsequent
>fruits. Plant a patch of little brother chile on the side. I recommend NM
>6.
>These 4 crops can keep you well fed and happy just by themselves. One does
>need to know how to make posole (hominy), which develops missing B
>vitamins
>in the corn and enables you to make tamales and tortillas.
>Go to: http://www.lasacequias.org/media/25quevivan.mp3 for an audio
>presentation by Sembandos Semillas (seed planters), the youth group of the
>New Mexico Acequia Association, for how to make posole.
>Lynn Montgomery
>Mayordomo, Acequia la Rosa de Castilla, Placitas, NM
>
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