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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Digging in the Dirt

I got a good workout on Monday. I found myself telling Stanley that I just had to "get the corn in" this weekend, and he laughed to hear me talking like just another Wisconsin farmer.

The corn is Cherokee white flour corn - an heirloom variety bred specifically for making corn meal. It's going to be the base for the cornbread that we'll serve at our wedding in October. My task on Monday was to finish preparing the soil and get it planted at our community garden space, which just two years ago was a highway on ramp to US30.

Even after one year of work, the ground at our plot is heavily compacted and the soil is very low quality. It resembles cement more than anything else.... but there's lots of sun, and if we can build it up it will be a wonderful spot in years to come. There's a part of me that loves the fact that I'm turning a little patch of Earth that would barely grow weeds into a lush garden using just my own (and Stanley's) manpower.

The ground is so hard here that last year we ended up working it a little, but mostly just growing in compost spread on top. This worked wonderfully for a month or so, until the roots hit the hard soil - they plants did miserably after that and we barely got anything at all from it. This year we took a different tact. Stanley did the bulk of the hardest work, turning the soil and loosening it up about a a foot down.

I then trucked about 14 large wheelbarrows full of compost (the city drops is off for free) and worked it in, leveling and breaking up the clods as I went. This was hard work, but quire rewarding in the end. This is actually starting to resemble something that might be called a growing medium!

My plan for this garden is a traditional "three sisters" garden, with corn, beans, and squash. All of it is for the wedding: dry beans for baked beans and pie pumpkins for our cake. Renee's Garden has a nice description of how to do the Three Sisters planting which I followed almost exactly.

The plot is 16' x 25', so I used twine and a measuring tape to measure 3 long rows. It's hard to see in this picture, but I used rocks to mark every 5 feet staggered along the rows. This is where the corn and bean mounds will go.

Here are the completed mounds, with the fence that Stanley built to keep the critters out. I loosened the soil underneath the mounds really well and used a little more compost to build them up. I was careful to incorporate some of the existing soil as well so that the plants aren't shocked when they find out what this garden plot is really made of. Each mound has four corn seeds planted in a square. Once the corn is up, the beans will get planted in the same mounds (they'll grow up the corn), and the pumpkins will be planted in mounds between the corn/bean mounds. Cool, huh?

I realized that I have way more space than I need for the few pie pumpkins we'll use for the wedding, so I ordered four different varieties of pumpkins to use as decoration at the wedding: Cinderella, Velenciano (a white variety), Black Futsu, and Musque de Provence. How fun!

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