Multi-Cropping Small Plots In The Appalachian Garden

Hickory King Corn--Photo by Hoss Tools

Recently, I shared a Facebook post from my friend Dawn Whiteside Rubin on the Facebook group "Appalachian Cooks" about what the post described as an early Native American practice of multi-cropping what they referred to as "The Three Sisters" in their gardens.  The three sisters were corn, green beans, and squash.  When I shared the post to the "Appalachian Cooks" group, I did so with a prefatory comment that when I was growing up in Knott County in Eastern Kentucky my family had always done the same thing.  The original Facebook post stated that the squash vines would cover the ground and eliminate most weeds.  I don't remember it being exactly like that.  And in our practice at home, we always raised four vegetables in the same space: Hickory King Corn, White Half Runner Beans, Irish Potatoes, and Cushaw, which is a large form of crook neck squash which can sometimes weigh more than twenty pounds each.  We always planted our potatoes as early as the ground was thawed and dry enough to plow.  Since potatoes were one of the key staple crops we raised, we wanted to eat them as early as possible.  Potatoes can actually be planted in the fall in small amounts such as a single row for early eating potatoes in the following spring.  After the winter has set in enough to prevent the potatoes from sprouting, you can dig a row in your garden deep enough to get the seed potatoes a bit below the hard freeze line and then place your smallest potatoes, those too small to eat productively, in the row you have dug if they have a couple of eyes.  Then it is best to cover them, or even surround them with a mulch of dead leaves, grass clippings, or hay and straw to help insulate them, then cover them up with plenty dirt and wait for spring.  As soon as the ground thaws enough for the soil to warm and potatoes to sprout, they will sprout and start to grow.  This often happens well before you could have plowed the garden, planted potatoes, and gotten them to sprout.  If all goes well, that single row of potatoes will be blooming about the time you have hoed your others the first time.  You can begin to gravel potatoes out of that row for meals well before your other, primary crop are blooming.  You eat out of that row until they are gone and plow it or till it for another crop such as spring greens, onions, radishes, or lettuce. For those you who have  never heard the term graveling applied to potatoes, it means that when they start to bloom it is about the correct time to use your fingers to dig into the side of a hill to see if you have new potatoes about the size of a golf ball or bigger.  If so, you dig up that hill and use them to make new potatoes and gravy. If you don't have eating sized new potatoes, just put the dirt back in place and that sample hill will still grow and produce. If you have new sweet peas by that time, you can also use them with cream gravy which makes a wonderful early spring meal. Of course, the   ideal spring meal would also include wilted lettuce and green onions if you have everything ready to eat at the same time.

Pontiac Red Potatoes--Photo by Burpee's Inc.

Let's get back to the original motivation for this blog post, what the Native Americans apparently called "The Three Sisters".  Our version of this was not referred to as anything other than "planting the garden" or maybe "planting corn and beans" but you already know that we planted more than just corn and beans in this manner.  We began by planting our potatoes early, usually a one hundred pound bag of seed potatoes which had generally been halved at least if they had sufficient eyes and sometimes even cut into thirds or fourths if they were large enough with sufficient eyes. You should never cut a seed potato into pieces which only have one eye since sometimes and eye can prove to be infertile or simply not sprout for some unknown reason.  We might have laid our rows out with what we called balks, the space between the actual rows, being a bit wider than usual because of all the different vegetables in them.  When the potatoes sprouted and had been howed, usually twice, and the weather was warm enough to plant beans and corn, we would plant Hickory King Corn and White Half Runner Beans between the hills of potatoes.  We usually planted three grains of corn and two or three beans in each hill and thinned them to only the two strongest plants of each variety when they were hoed the first time.

White Half Runner Beans--Photo by Etsy

We did the best we could to hoe the corn and bean hills twice or to, at least shave the weeds out from between the hills of the various kinds of produce growing in this obviously busy space.  But I still do not recall that having squash or cushaw growing randomly between the rows ever produced enough leaves to prevent the need for chopping out the weeds. After the corn grew up to about three feet, the bean vines were already twined around them and reaching for the sky.  As long as the corn sprouted and grew, it was never necessary to spend time bending to pick beans.  Sometimes, that Hickory King Corn and the accompanying beans would grow in excess or seven or eight feet and it became necessary to bend the corn stalks over to pick the beans and whatever roasting ears we decided to eat from the field corn when the time was right.  Also, always remember that Hickory King Corn will get hard quickly.  If you intend to eat it as roasting ears, you need to do that a bit before the ears are totally full. In some cases, Hickory King Corn can reach ten feet in a rich soil. Many people cannot adapt to the heavier flavor of the Hickory King field corn but we all loved it.   As for the beans, we used them fresh as soon as they were full usually cooked with a good sized hunk of smoked hog jaw.  But the majority of the crop were divided between canning and drying as shucked beans. The majority of the Hickory King Corn was picked in the fall and saved for livestock feed and next year's seed corn.  We also used the corn blades and stalks for fodder for our livestock.  We cut what we called "top fodder" by cutting, bundling, and shocking the stalks complete with leaves above the top ear of corn.  The bottom blades we pulled for blade fodder and also saved it in bundles.  Most livestock will simply not eat the heavy bottom stalks of corn so we just plowed that under at plowing time. 

Cushaw--Photo by Eden Brothers

The cushaw never required any hoeing and produced enough of the oversized hard shelled squash to fill our needs for the winter. We loved it cut into chunks and baked with butter and brown sugar or molasses.  We saved the extra cushaws as long as we could in a cellar or smoke house but it usually will begin to rot before winter is over so you need to watch it closely and eat it early if needed.  But I have learned lately that cushaw is a very good vegetable for freezing and my wife and I try to freeze enough each year now so that we can eat cushaw all year around.  It works really well in a Food Saver vacuum sealer.  I always laugh when I see cushaws being used only for lawn decoration at Halloween.  I can assure you that cushaw is a wonderful food and you need to try one this fall. Cushaws are also excellent as the main ingredient in autumn pies or canned as cushaw butter.  If you want it in a pie, just use your favorite pumpkin pie recipe and it will work beautifully.  If you want to use it canned as cushaw butter, just remove the flesh from the shell and prepare it with your favorite apple butter recipe.  It really is a wonderful vegetable and one of my favorites. 

I sincerely hope that this blog post has helped some of you to see how you can maximize usage of the small garden in Appalachia or anywhere else.  By doing this form of multi-cropping with these four vegetables, you can turn out a ton of food in an amazingly small amount of space.  Have fun in your next year's garden.