Growing The 3 Sisters

I'm planning an ambitious project for next year: a big 3 Sisters field. Here's the game-plan

Permaculture tends to focus on perennials, and it's not hard to understand why. Perennial plants (those which come back year after year) offer unparalleled efficiency: once established, they crank out food (or biomass or whatever) with very low inputs. While getting them established is often a significant amount of work, the pay-off comes in the form of many years of low-effort yields. An established, stable perennial permaculture system is about as good as it gets.

That is not to say, however, that there is no place for annuals. Because they only live for a single growing season, annuals race to reproduce, outpacing perennials many times over. That frantic attempt to reproduce is why annuals yield copious quantities of calorie-dense food: they do not have the luxury of waiting until next year. If they don't produce viable seed in one season, they are gone for good.

So in the interest of growing a ton of calories while expanding my knowledge of annuals, I've decided to dedicate 3,000 sq ft of my garden next year to an annual polyculture: the 3 Sisters.

Prior to the rise of industrial agriculture, both perennial and annual polycultures (mixed species plantings) were common throughout the world. The Amazon jungle, for instance, is a product of perennial polycultures, as are biodiversity-rich patches of forest throughout the world.

Ancient annual polycultures, by their nature, do not endure in the same way as perennial polycultures, but nonetheless, the 3 Sisters has managed to become the most famous polyculture of them all. A combination of corn, beans, and squash, the 3 Sisters have been grown in a variety of different configurations across North, Central, and South America for ages.

The 3 Sisters polyculture has a lot going for it, which accounts for its very widespread application. This classic polyculture produces more calories than any one of its components could alone (I will note that the excellent study I've linked to here actually undersells the 3 Sisters since it did not include the edible leaves of the squash, an important yield.) Once planted, it demands little maintenance, since it is self-fertilizing and weed suppressing. And all three of its components are harvested simultaneously, requiring only one harvest day for three different crops. As annuals go, it's about as efficient as it gets: very high-output, fairly low-input.