A Three Sisters Garden Project Gets Soaked and Seeded! Now We Learn!

Our first mound is soaked and seeded! We have five seed holes, each a varied mix of maize, beans, and squash: Oaxacan Green Dent maize, Wampum maize, Hidatsa shield pole bean, Trukey Craw pole bean, Lakota Squash, American Tondo squash, Pink Banana squash, Hubbard Golden squash, Sweet Meat squash, Hubbard Blue squash, and Guatemalan Blue Squash. All hardy, continent-natives. Now we will see which works best for the garden.

Stay tuned because over the next few weeks we'll be mounding for a second row of the three sisters, the everglades tomato, an assortment of chili peppers, and some bush beans. We have local peach pits chilling in the fridge in prep for popping and planting. Peaches are continent-natives. How awesome is that!

It was rough going, today, working the trough to an even flow of water, working in all the water as we bored down through the mound to fill our makeshift watershed, but we think we got it flush. What we learned Today is soak the water shed before we bury it. Much easier.

We also dug in what I like to call sinkers: varied sizes of palm wood hunks and tree wood hunks that are planted beneath the seed holes. They serve as water caches and give the roots something to anchor to, securing them in gusty gulf winds.

The Garden funny of the week is that Mike is making us these fantastic critter proof cages. He delivered one yesterday measuring a perfect 8 feet. Heather and I must have gotten very excited prepping the mound for that cage because it turned out to be 12 feet, not eight. I had to find a temporary solution for the extra four feet. I plan on staking down the entire set up this evening, so let's all hope it works.

You know, I can't count all the people that are surprised by the fact that any maize besides the very uniformed yellow and white (corn) they get at the store is edible. The rainbow colored corn and the green dent are delicious and the green dent especially prized for making tortillas and tamales. I love them all, roasted on a fire with lime, garlic, and chilies. They are smaller perfect-serving ears, and offer a lovely flavor to any meal.