Three Sisters

I finished the planting at McCormick today - this is the Three Sisters garden with corn, beans, and squash, all destined for our wedding feast.

Two weeks ago I planted the corn in 14 mounds. As you can kind of see in this photo, it's now up and growing quickly, which means it was time today to plant the bean and pumpkin seeds. The beans get planted in the mounds with the corn, to grow up the corn stalks. The pumpkins go in mounds between the corn.

The little corn plants are looking good.... and growing really quickly. Hard to believe that it will (hopefully) be knee high by the Fourth of July, but if all goes well it will be.

Lots and lots of weeds had also germinated in the last two weeks. Step one of my work today was to cultivate between the mounds.... just a 45 minute job, but the 90 degree heat made it seem much longer.

These two five gallon buckets are all the compost that our kitchen and chickens created last summer. Amazing how it shrinks. I brought it over to give the pumpkins, corn, and beans a much needed boost.

Here are the pumpkin mounds created and seeds planted. I worked more of the free city compost into the new mounds, along with a shovel-full of the homemade compost. This soil is so poor, I will still need to fertilize it as it grows. Hopefully all the compost will at least give it a good start.

The last step was to mulch the whole thing with straw. Two bales perfectly covered all the space I needed it to. It should keep the weeds down at least a little, and it will make good organic matter to incorporate next year. Now we just have to wait and hope there is enough fertility in this soil to grow a decent crop.

I should show you the Main Street garden while I'm at it. This garden has none of the soil issues that McCormick has, and consequently gardening seems like a breeze here. All the help from the fam doesn't hurt either. Things are finally all cleaned up and planted.... looks good, huh?

These tomatoes have a long way to go to grow into their cages.

Soon I will harvest and dry some of this mint for our wedding... peppermint tea after dinner is the plan.

The potatoes are up! These are also for the wedding.

The snap peas are looking good. We planted melons and zucchini in mounds in front of them, and cucumbers in a row behind them After the peas are done, the cucumbers will grow up the trellis and the melons and zucchini will spread out in front. At least that's the plan.

Little baby cucumbers. Hard to believe how much they will grow.

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