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Urban gardeners often struggle with the perennial challenge of limited outdoor space, often attempting to cultivate too much within small plots.
For those seeking innovative solutions to growing a variety of produce in a small raised bed or border, an ancient technique offers a compelling answer.
The ‘Three Sisters’ companion planting method, which originated from indigenous North American tribes, provides a system for maximum yield.
It involves growing sweetcorn, beans, and squash together, based on the principle that these plants thrive through a symbiotic relationship.
The corn supported the climbing (runner) beans, enriching the soil with nitrogen, while the squash grew beneath, providing good ground cover and helping to suppress weeds and retain moisture.
“We’ve moved away from the idea of just growing a crop in a bed with empty soil between the plants,” says Paul Kettel, garden manager in charge of edibles. RHS Garden Wisley In Surrey.
Kettle objects to the planting of native ‘Three Sisters’ vegetables – climbing beans, sweetcorn and squash – in the UK.
“Theoretically it looks like a really clever system where you get three crops instead of one on the same piece of land. I’ve tried it in gardens myself before, but in my opinion it rarely works because it’s a bit of a misinterpretation that native Americans Are doing.
“They were growing in a part of the world where the light levels were higher than ours and the heat was warmer. As I understand it, they were growing beans for drying, corn and squash for milling, crops that are quite vigorous.
“You’ll leave them until late summer, when your squash are ripe and your beans are dry, and harvest them all at the same time.
“When people translate this to the UK and grow sweetcorn, runner beans and squash, I find that runner beans will usually swallow the sweetcorn and can often be so vigorous that they pull up the sweetcorn.
“If you’re going to try this in the UK, you’ll need to get your sweetcorn to a foot or two tall before you plant the runner beans at the base.
“If you look at how much space your squash take up, it can be a problem to harvest your runner beans regularly in the summer. You have to walk over the squash, the stem, the leaves and the fruit itself. It makes it really difficult to get to the beans.”
Crops that may be useful:
“Maybe tomatoes growing on top of a frame and marigolds and basil flowers underneath that, which is a classic combination, rather than just bare soil around the base of the tomatoes,” explains Kettel.
“I think you can be quite successful growing sweetcorn and then grow squash at the base. If I were doing it in my allotment, I would happily do that. But I would probably grow my beans on wigwams with canes at the edge of that plot.”
But rhs He stressed that in Wisley’s major garden, gardeners grow combinations of plants at all times, allowing some to grow around the base of others.
If your soil isn’t rocky, you can also grow root vegetables like carrots right next to your climbers at the base of your wigwam, as long as they’re not located in the middle of the wigwam because they need plenty of light, he suggests.
train fruit trees
“Try different things. All our trained fruit along our range is here at the World Food Garden in Wisley,” he explains.
“Now we’ve got alpine strawberries that we’ve allowed to spread there. We have marjoram and oregano growing along the base, which is covering the bare soil and, combined with the apple trees grafted around it, is protecting the health of that soil.”
But you’re not limited to apple trees.
“We have pears and plums. We have those too.” sichuan The peppers that we are training on the wall have plants growing around the base.
“We have figs and all the hybrid soft berries you can think of, gooseberries and red currants and they have thyme and oregano and alpine strawberries growing around their base and they are doing brilliantly.”