Sweetcorn

We didn’t plant any corn this year, and I’ve got to be honest, I have a real sense that this is some kind of grown-up specialist crop that relative allotment novices like us shouldn’t be growing – does that make any sense?

Anyway, I’ve been peering and peeking around the site, to see how other people are growing sweetcorn and it’s obvious that it’s not a crop that really loves the strong Sussex winds (locals call them breezes, I call them gales, but we can compromise on winds) that buffet the allotment site. But it’s also obvious that some people have got the sweetcorn growing gene, and produce oodles of the stuff, even using sucessional sowing to get early and late crops. I love sweetcorn and think the supermarket prices are just daft, I’m definitely going to have to give it a go next year. But that means we really, really, really have to get some fences up so that we can shelter this tall crop.

The couple of allotmenteers that were using the Three Sisters method don’t seem to have had much success, but I can’t work out why – it seems that their squashes probably got away faster than their corn and smothered the growth: that’s how it looks, anyway. I shall have to think long and hard about this … anybody care to share sweetcorn raising tips?

Labels: allotment-corn, allotment-sweetcorn, allotment-three-sisters

Three sisters planting for allotments

A friend of mine is trying out this system of planting, made famous by several Native American tribes and thinks I should too. The basic principle underlying the process is simple and elegant – if it works. What you do is plant the three sisters: sweetcorn, squash and beans all in the same hole. The theory is that the corn makes a support for the (runner) beans, the squash (courgette or cucumber) helps to suppress weeds by providing a ground cover something like a living mulch and the beans are a nitrogen fixer, improving the soil for both the other crops. The beans should finish first, and when the corn is ready to harvest the squashes can be allowed to run rampant, as they do.

Hmmm … I can see how it might work somewhere closer to the equator, but here? I think that the wetter, cooler climate of the UK will cause the following:

1. The beans will get very leafy and shade the squashes
2. The corn will mature more slowly than the beans, meaning that the cobs also get shaded by the bean leaves and thus won’t ripen
3. The squashes will be slow to ripen but will otherwise do fine (they are pretty indestructible)

It seems to me that this might not be a system that translates very well to the British allotment, not least because one usually has enough space to grow whatever one wants, and although I can find quite a number of people online who’ve said they are going to grow the Three Sisters way, I can’t find any reports on the results and that makes me wonder how well it works.

Has anybody out there tried it? Want to share the outcomes?

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-corn, allotment-squash, three-sisters-planting