my parents have had a garden as long as i can remember; as children, my sister and i participated by dint of "chores" and sometimes attempting to cultivate our own beds. i remember a patch of pumpkins particularly.
as an adult i have not had a whole lot of access to soil. a more green-thumbed-than-i apartment neighbor likened my feeble attempts to maintain houseplants to protracted torture sessions for the plants - the opposite of waterboarding: drydirting, and shading. anyway, unequipped to perceive the medium in which plants scream and groan, if any, and considering it may be a fair characterization, i soon gave away those survivors that weren't cactus. the cactus, a prickly pear variety, more or less thrived.
in reading charles mann's 1491 last winter i learned a little bit about some of the modes of agriculture practiced by the indigenous people of central and south america -- who, incidentally, invented most of our food -- and with interest about the three staple co-crops: maize, beans and squash. this -- without the slash and burn; not enough land for the slash and burn (also local ordinances may apply) -- is what i wanted to try. there was reinforcing resonance with some wendell berry notions about land use, a tantalizing background feature of the setting of neal stephenson's anathem, in which members of a cloistered community grow their produce in individually-tended "tangles," the prospect of subsisting on which really appealed.
the small plot planted with maize, beans and squash was denoted a milpa in 1491; i took this as my search term in seeking (whatever the search engine chooses to highlight among) the collective wisdom of all people with internet, and found just about nothing useful. it was significantly later, well after the garden had been dug and tilled and planted and fenced and hoed and weeded and watered, that i stumbled across a reference to the "three sisters" which are conveniently featured on the sakagewea dollar, while searching for a deer and rabbit discouraging "companion planting" approach.
(bucket & spade for scale)
having lost that great maple, i now enjoy a much sunnier back yard. i did not do a whole lot of rational planning in selecting the site: i had been more attentive to where the rain runoff flows through and pools in the yard than to where the sunlight strikes, and chose a modestly-sized plot on a high point that turned out to be somewhat subject to house shadows. also, the part of earth that was to become the garden bed, being close to the stump of the former maple, was rife with convoluted roots. (on reflection: i think the rootbound character of my former houseplants' situation might qualify as a stress position ... for inclusion on the list of my crimes, above). pop came over and played shane to my inept, impotent, innocent, nigh-cuckolded, joe starrett with the roots there -- or rather enough of them to have a foot and a half deep bed; the roots themselves appear to be solidly massed all the way down -- except that there was no jean arthur, no jack palance, and no tow-headed waif lacking role models. it will probably never be safe to run a rototiller over this bed.
i think i bought my seeds from that rack at home supply boxstore where, to my dismay, there were way more varieties than i had prepared to face for each of my target crops. eventually settled on a corn, and thought "summer squash" sounded sufficiently generic and familiar. screwed up on the beans, though, buying bush rather than climbing beans. some more experienced gardeners comforted me, suggesting that such preferences are not necessarily fixed, so that my beans may revert to a climbing mode. this did not, however, turn out to be the case.
i planted the corn and beans, and, two weeks later thinned the corn, probably not enough, and planted the squash.
there are stupid rabbits in my yard. i adjudge them stupid, that is, because of how late and slow they tend to flee when i encounter them, but actually suspect this is just normal rabbit behavior, making those who forage in my yard likely to rate of about average intelligence. for rabbits. i haven't caught one barehanded, yet, but have, on a couple occasions only refrained from giving it a sincere go by considering what i might then do with a panicked rabbit in my grasp. maybe my visceral conviction that they ought to exhibit a great deal more fear of me, and my offence that they do not, is unfounded.
they surely have more to fear from birds of prey and foxes. i have seen a small hawk, and understand there to be hungry owls in the area. in fact, a bird of prey or fox did just what i had been joking about doing, leaving a grislier totem than an impaled head, though: all the parts that weren't meat or organ in a loosely-connected skein of sinew, skin and skeleton. i think it must have been done by a fox, understanding raptors to leave a somewhat more compact, and less recognizable, bone ball.
the menace did not deter those rabbits surviving from foraging in my garden. a neighbor also reported seeing a deer. the forager clearly preferred the sprouting leafy bean bushes to the corn. i deployed fencing and all was good.
the corn proved virile
and nubile,
and sprouted ears.
in no time the whole bed looked like a garden,
replete with its own mantidae (and other insects).
(not a great pic; featured here for the beanleaves and notional continuity.
the good photo was already posted in the "yard fauna" post from august.)
the bush beans did not revert to climbers; there were a few heartier bushes that were pretty good producers. overall, though, the bushes were too shaded by the corn, which i may not have thinned enough, anyway, and remained stunted. they produced a few meals' worth of beans that were crisp and tasty raw and steamed up nicely. this might have been the most successful crop of the three in terms of edible production.
the corn produced a lot of growths that seemed to promise to become ears, but only a few of them did. not a huge corn eater, i had hoped to have many to give away. as it turned out, i produced about four that were recognizable as the kind of ears of corn that people eat around here, and twice as many not-properly formed and developed nodes of ear-like corn growth that might be suitable for livestock feed. the closest thing to livestock i have is a mulch pile. in they went.
those four recognizable ears did not inspire a great deal of confidence either.
they cleaned up pretty well, though. i ate them all myself and found them to be delicious.
notwithstanding my one delightful corn-intensive meal (my cornmeal!) the poor yield from the maybe too many, too crowded plants does not rate as a success. (contemporaneous research and anecdote suggests corn is difficult in small plots due to pollination concerns; i am not aware how such issues may have affected my crop, but if each of those little silken threads must get its own pollen grain in order to produce a robust kernel -- which i'm not sure, but surmise as possibly the case -- then my ears could have used a bit more. which is strange because there were times everything out there seemed to be covered with corn pollen.
oh yeah: the squash. the squash also appeared to have been too much in the shadow of the corn. it produced several yellow squash, kind of small, before the corn was harvested and the stalks cut down. after that, many more flowers, but few of them developed into squash. the plants were still flowering, without much fruit production in early november when i consigned them to the mulchpile. in retrospect, i probably should have let them and the beans continue until the frost. i guess i did not get any photos of the squash. without meaning any disrespect to lovers of yellow summer squash, i detect in myself evidence of the view that squash may be unremarkable.
i would expect or aspire to do better at every stage of more or less the same process next year, except i am not certain that i will: i have undertaken other projects certain to take priority over gardening in the near term. but i do hope to cultivate a plot whenever i can: it is very satisfying.