Three Sisters in the making

First some good news: Congratulations to our daughter Emma and her husband Dave on the birth of their daughter Holly Louise, born on 1st May at 11:41 p.m. Welcome to the world, Holly! Mother and baby both well. Going round to see them tonight...

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This year I am going to have a Three Sisters bed for the first time. This is the traditional combination of beans, corn and squash, which was supposedly how the Native Americans used to grow their veg. The beans give nitrogen to the squash and corn; the corn gives support to the beans and squash, and the squash shades the roots of both beans and corn to conserve moisture and suppress weeds, so everyone helps everyone else. Sounds to me like a good system  - certainly worth a try. However, based on advice from fellow bloggers like Sue from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments, I will be providing the beans with some additional (artificial) support in the form of canes.

I have 16 Sweet corn seedlings that are mostly big enough to plant out:

One or two of the seeds I sowed in those little 3" pots rotted and never germinated, so I re-sowed them. This is why some of the plants are a lot bigger than some others. The bigger ones look pretty good though:

I'm hesitating about planting them out into the open, because of the adverse weather we have been having. First it was very cold, now it is very wet and windy.

The squash plants I am using are ones called "Butterbush", a Butternut variety bred to be very compact, so they should be ideal for growing in a small raised bed. My plan is to have a layout that has a central teepee of poles supporting 8 or 10 "Cherokee Trail of Tears" bean plants, flanked on either side by a Butterbush squash plant and either 6 or 8 Sweet Corn plants, depending on how big they look when I'm ready to plant them out. The Sweet Corn is a variety called "Mirai Yellow".

The squash plants are still small too, and they are not robust enough to go outside without protection just yet, so I will be planting them underneath a couple of those big plastic cloches that I have - probably in another week or so. Is it too much to hope that by that time we might see some sunshine again??

This tray has two each of the "Butterbush" squash, cocktail cucumbers "Iznik" and another squash called "Autumn Crown". None of them look particularly good. They are too leggy for my liking, having been reared mostly indoors where the light level is fairly low, and the first leaves seem to have been severely nibbled by something, leaving them yellow and transparent. Fortunately the next set of leaves is looking undamaged as yet. [The long thin leaves, by the way, are the cotyledons or "seed-leaves", which naturally shrivel and drop off.]

This one is a cucumber, but they're all affected in the same way.

As for beans, no sign yet of the Cherokee ones germinating. I sowed them in pots in my garage on 6th April. so for the time being all I can show you is some of my Runner Beans ("Scarlet Empire") which are slightly ahead: