Guerilla in a Bright Red Dress: Sumac

Over the summer, Christopher took this photo (left) of sumac in bloom on our land -- if you click to enlarge, you'll see how beloved the sumac flower is by bees. Providing sustenence for pollenators is just one of the wonders of sumac, a woefully under-appreciated plant.  

Sumacs are a family of native plants that grow througout most of North America, and are widely thought of as a common weed.  Here in WNC, sumac grows along the highways and in trashed-out urban lots, among other places.  It's a tough plant.

I've heard sumac's growth habit described as rangy or scrappy, but if you look at stands that have been allowed to mature, the plants cluster together and take on a graceful, curvy, elegant form that I think is quite beautiful.  

In the summer, sumac looks like a bushy green shrub or small tree, eventually bearing huge yellow flowers.  In the fall, the leaves turn deep crimson and the flowers dry on the plant, becoming a gorgeous shade of red. After the leaves are gone, bright red fruit clusters remain on the tips of the long thin branches.  

Below: two photos of Sumac that I took across the river at Warren Wilson College today - neither of these shots captures the color but you can get a sense of the shapes of sumac trees.

Coming across a stand of sumac in the winter feels to me like witnessing a ritual of some kind. A mature patch of sumac with its branches bare looks like a gathering of lanky, sinewy women, arms and legs intertwined, reaching up to the sky.  In the winter the sumac sisters, those tough leafy warriors, shed their red dresses and stand still together,  their arms snaking throuh the air, holding up offerings of bright red fruit.  Magical.

Each red sumac pod is made up of a cluster of tiny bright red berries. Birds and animals feast on the fruits as long as they last--the fruit is a rare treat for wildlife in a winter landscape.  

Food and medicine traditions of many native peoples include sumac, and for good reason.  The dried fruit makes a deliciously tart beverage, and the tiny hairs on each of the small red fruits are jam-packed with vitamin C.  In addition to the high C content, sumac fruits contain potent natural antibiotics (Foster/Duke).  According to Peterson's field guide to medicinal herbs,  sumac was used to treat and prevent a wide variety of maladies in native traditions throughout North America.  For more on sumac's medicinal qualities, see this overview.)  

So back to our sumac.  In the fall, Christopher remembered that an old friend of his, Lalynn, used to make a tea from dried sumac heads to drink during the winter, and decided he wanted to harvest some for us.   So he picked some dried heads of sumac and we broke them apart and let them air dry inside (see photo above) before jarring them up.  We left plenty behind for the birds and other wildlife, and ended up with about a half gallon of dry sumac berries.  I snacked on the tiny berries as we processed the heads, and the zingy, tart flavor was so strong it sometimes made my eyes water.  This winter we'll use the berries to make hot sumac tea or steep and then cool and strain to produce refreshing sumac-ade.  

I appreciate sumac as food and medicine, but most of all because I see it as a plant that goes where others can't, takes root, and grows like wild.  Sumac is often found growing in neglected areas, along roadsides, in old railroad beds, and in places where woods have been recently cleared or there has been a fire.  

Above: Sumac and rivercane growing on a roadside in Swannanoa, December.

I see Sumac as a guerilla gardener of the plant world, with dandelion and mullien and other tough front-line plants, dropping seeds in wastelands and bringing bare earth back to life.  

Sumac is one of the first plants to come in as living systems begin to recover and regenerate.  It is drought-tolerant and can survive conditions that would kill many other kinds of plants, and it helps make way for a succession of plant and animal life gradually to renew and heal damaged places.  (See the US Forest Service's page on Sumac for more information on sumac's role in rehabilitation of damaged and disturbed land, as well as other interesting facts about sumac).  

I'm thankful to sumac for being one of the tough ones on the front lines of the healing of damaged ecosystems.  And for its beauty and healing power, and its tenacious presence as an ancient native medicinal plant.  

Long live sumac--graceful, strong, and powerful plant warrior adorned in flaming red!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

References:

Foster, Steven and James A. Duke.  A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern and Central North America, Second Edition.  Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Winter Seed Catalog Lesson #1: Tepary Beans

My annual winter seed catalog immersion has officially begun, and as usual it is promising to be a rich educational experience.   Every winter as I read and re-read the dozens of seed catalogues that come in the mail, I learn a ton about about seed histories, vegetable diversity, and food traditions.  

If you are a beginning gardener, I recommend getting on the mailing lists of good seed companies, particularly those selling open-pollenated and heirloom varieties.  Good seed catalogues are fabulous sources of gardening information, food lore, and growing tips. 

So yesterday I was cozied up on the couch reading the Seeds of Change catalog (no better way to spend a very cold Sunday, in my opinion). When I got to the bean section, I came across a whole species I had never heard of, which rates as a discovery significant enough to blog about.  

At left: A few heirloom bean varieties from the Saving Our Seeds collection.

I love heirloom beans, and have grown several beautiful and delicious dry bean varieties over the years and fantasized about growing a whole lot more.  

I have about 35 particular bean varieties on my lifetime bean-growing wishlist.  And the list keeps growing. 

Jacob's Cattle. Hutterite Soup. Black Valentine. Indian Woman Yellow.  Amish Gnuttle. Even the names are magical to me.  I've spent hours poring over bean listings in the Seed Savers Exchange catalogue and reading about the histories of the hundreds (thousands?) of bean varieties that exist.  What I am saying is that I am a major heirloom bean dork (See previous posts on Local Protein and Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans for more evidence of this...)  

So imagine my surprise when I discovered Tepary Beans (the aformentioned whole new species) a type of bean more ancient and storied than any of the heirlooms I've ever known.  Three varieties of Tepary Beans were listed in a sidebar in the Seeds of Change catalog, along with the botanical name of the species: Phaeseolus acutifolius.  This was enough to send me down the google rabbit hole in search of more information about the mysterious Tepary. 

Here's what I found: Tepary Beans are pre-Colombian heirlooms with flavors and growing habits distinct from other beans.  They were cultivated throughout dry areas of what is now the Southwestern US, Mexico, and Central America, selected from native beans and grown for thousands of years by ancient peoples.  

I found much more in a Seeds of Change newsletter article by Jay Bost:

"While most beans that we eat belong to the species Phaeseolus vulgaris and are native to South America, tepary beans belong to an entirely different species, Phaeseolus acutifolius, which grows wild in the Sonoran Desert, with local populations currently documented on Isla Tiburon in the Sea of Cortez and in the Santa Maria mountains of Arizona (Nabhan 1985). As long ago as 8,000 years ago, the native peoples of the Sonoran Desert began to domesticate wild tepary beans, which, until quite recently, were eaten by some in Mexico, along with Phaeseolus filiformis, another wild desert bean." 

Bost details the history of Tepary Beans, and the reasons that they are apparently experiencing something of a revival.. He says that Teparies "are considered by many to be the most drought-tolerant annual legume in the world" and "are capable of producing a harvest of beans with a single rain."  We've been in a severe drought for the last two years here in Western North Carolina, so a bean that can grow without irrigation is an exciting discovery indeed.

Bost's article also details the nutritional appeal of Teparies:

"Part of the tepary bean's appeal, in addition to its drought tolerance, is its superior nutritional content. It has a higher protein content (23–30%) than common beans such as pinto, kidney, and navy, as well as higher levels of oil, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, phosphorus, and potassium."

Bost's overview is great - you can read the whole article here.

  

So I've added Sonoran Gold Tepary Beans (pictured above, courtesy of Seeds of Change) to my bean wishlist.  It's a dry soup bean developed by the Papago people, and contains more than 30% crude protein.  

We'll plant some in the spring and see how they taste.    Stay tuned for further adventures in seed catalogue reading.  

Stackcake and Bear Scat: Giving Thanks

Wednesday morning we harvested collards, mustard greens, celery, parsley, and lettuces from the garden (above), packed up some of our winter squash and pumpkins, and headed for my parents' home about an hour away for Thanksgiving.


My mom and dad live on 50 acres of mostly wooded land in a rural community* near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They bought their land 30 years ago, when land in the remote areas of western North Carolina was cheap and mostly wild.

My parents built their house --the house I grew up in--in 1979 and they live there still. They have been dedicated to preserving and caring for the land for the past 30 years. Over the course of my lifetime, I've seen the hardwood forest around my parents' home slowly regenerating as time passes and the earth heals itself from the injuries of logging and clearing sustained before our time. It has been a huge part of my education to see the plants and trees, animals and birds in the woods around my parents' house thrive and reproduce, creating and strengthening living systems.

The land around my parents' house is just as much home to my sister and me as the house itself -- we spent much of our childhoods outside in the woods, creek, and pasture land, and we know the land as intimately as if were another member of our family. We grew up learning the names of the trees and plants, animals, birds, and insects that shared our home. All of those living things still feel like they are part of my extended family -- all our relations as some native peoples would say.

Calling in the Ancestors

The day before Thanksgiving was my mom's birthday, and I had resolved to try my first recipe from my favorite new cookbook/history book (see my earlier post for details).

I wanted to bake a traditional Southern Appalachian stackcake with apples, but because my mom loves cranberries and because I already had some for Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, I wanted to incorporate cranberries, too.

So here(above) is my modified, nontraditional stackcake. I started with a recipe for Apple Stack Cake from the book I mentioned above, Joseph Dabney's Smokehouse Ham, Spoonbread, and Scuppernong Wine.

Here's some background on stackcake from Dabney:

"This is probably the most 'mountain' of cakes. . . .One story goes that since fancy 'in fare' wedding cakes were beyond the reach of many...mountain families, neighbor wives would bring in cake layers to donate to the bride's family. Author Elizabeth Dunn confirmed the tradition, declaring a bride's popularity was often measured by the number of layers in her cake! As the layers arrived, the bride's family would spread the apple filling between each."

Since Dabney notes that "while plain applesauce can be used in such cakes, dried apples offer a much stronger flavor and therefore were the choice of most mountain cooks," I decided to use some of the apples that Alan gleaned and dried earlier this summer. I made a slow-cooked apple sauce from the dried apples with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves and then followed this recipe for the cake:

Haywood County Stack Cake

• 4 cups flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. soda
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 3/4 cup shortning (I used butter)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup sorghum molasses (I used regular molasses)
• 1 cup milk
• 3 eggs
• 3 cups applesauce
  

Sift flour, salt, soda, and baking powder. Cream the shortning [butter] and add sugar, a little at a time, blending well. Add sorghum [or other molasses] and mix thoroughly. Add milk and eggs, one at a time, beating well until smooth. Pour 1/3 inch deep in greased 9-inch pans and bake until golden brown. when cool, stack the layers (around six) and use the applesauce between them.

According to Dabney, "This 1800s recipe was used for many years by Mrs. Dolphus Kerley of Waynesville, North Carolina, who died in January 1948, just shy of age ninety. The recipe actually came from her mother, Mrs. Drury Bigham, of the Allens Creek section of Haywood County, North Carolina."

I modified the recipe in a couple of ways. First, I used butter instead of shortening, which worked just fine. I substituted sugarcane molasses for the sorghum just because I didn't have any sorghum, but I fully intend to try it again with sorghum for a more traditional taste. Also, I decided to make fewer thicker layers -- a major departure from tradition -- and used a bundt pan for the top layer. I lined the bottom of the bundt pan (which became the top of the cake) with fresh apples, about 1/2 cup of my ginger cranberry sauce, and a little (less than a tablespooon of) raw sugar.

Also, the recipe doesn't give an oven temperature or time - I baked it at 350 degrees and it took about 50 minutes before a knife came out clean. If you made thinner layers as the original recipe suggests, I can't imagine you would want to bake it for more than 30 minutes.

Here's how the cake turned out (above). It was unbelievably, ridiculously delicious. It had a very old-fashioned molasses-ey spice cake flavor, and was moist and luscious with the apple and cranberry sauces seeping into the cake adding deep, tart fruity flavor to the sweetness of the cake. Holy smoke, it was good.

I really loved the taste, and of course I loved the feeling of holding a thread spinning back through the generations of food tradition: baking a cake in the same tradition nurtured and passed along by other women in these very mountains years ago. And I loved altering the tradition to suit the particular moment -- modifying ingredients, personalizing the recipe - stirring individual creativity into the rich blend of food heritage as have so many people who came before.

Cooking from an old recipe like this makes me feel connected to my ancestors - not my genetic ancestors necessarily, but all of the people who came before me.

Visiting the Wild Relations

Eventually, after a couple of days centered around the kitchen, featuring much enjoyment of the stackcake as well as baked winter squash from our garden, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, sweet potatoes, creamed corn, and a huge pot of slow-cooked collards from the photo at the top of this post, we needed to get out of the house and move our bodies.

We all went for a long walk in the woods the day after Thanksgiving, and came across two exciting things. First, we found a gorgeous hornets' nest. It seems to have been made by bald-faced hornets. It was incredibly light, with paper-thin walls made up of beautiful, overlapping swirls of grey and white. The nest was vacant and in pieces, which we picked up and carried home. Also we came across some fairly fresh bear scat full of persimmon seeds. Knowing that at some point in the recent past a black bear has passed through the very spot where I'm standing still sends a thrill through me. Thinking about the bear picking up persimmons off the ground, or climbing high up a persimmon tree to get to the sweet and sticky fruit feels to me like a little spell of connection with all of the wild animals in the woods. The forest was full of all kinds of activity -- but the hornets nest and the bear scat were the highlights -- little reminders of the presence of some of our wilder relations.

Large Enthusiastic Thank-yous

So I'm giving thanks for a few days spent with family and friends including a ritual of connection with the ancestors (baking stackcake) and moments of connection with all of our plant and animal relations (hornets, bears, trees, birds, woodland plants). I spent some time the day after Thanksgiving reading Ted Williams' The Thanksgiving Address, an interpretation of traditional Iroquois prayers of thanks-giving. The Thanksgiving Address is something that my dear friend Tyson shared with me from Williams' wonderful book, Big Medicine from Six Nations (pictured at left).

In the spirit of The Thanksgiving Address, I'll borrow the refrain from Ted Williams' version to offer my appreciation to the universe for the last few days:

Three times three times three large enthusiastic thank yous!

In gratitude...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*By "community" I mean a place too small to be called a town...

Winter Reading: From Scuppernongs to Switchel

When it gets cold outside, there's nothing I like more than curling up somewhere with a hot beverage, a cat, and a book. I come from a long line of bookworms, librarians, word-lovers, readers, writers, and other nerd-types. Book-loving is in my blood.

If the book contains recipes, food history, and stories about food, all the better as far as I am concerned. One of my all-time favorites is 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, by a hero of mine, seed saver and historian William Woys Weaver.

So I can't tell you how excited I was to be introduced last night to this book: Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine by Joseph E. Dabney. We were having dinner with our good friends Bud and MF. After a highly satisfying meal of stuffed butternut squash, cream of broccoli soup made from broccoli from their garden, and a creamy custard for dessert, we retired to the living room to talk about James Bond movies (!), Noam Chomsky, and traditional mountain "stack cakes." This last topic lead to MF whipping out the aforementioned book.

We found several very fine stack cake recipes within, but that was just the beginning. This book is a treasure trove of Southern Appalachian food lore, food histories, food traditions, and recipes. It's one part oral history, one part cookbook, and one part hymn to the people and traditions of the Southern Appalachians. It is meticulously researched and written with the reverence and relish of a person who has cultivated a long-lasting and deep love of food and food traditions.

I quickly became completely absorbed -- a whole chapter on sweet potatoes, another on persimmons, and a veritable profusion of information about old-time food-preserving techniques. Very old Cherokee recipes, wild foods traditions, and chapters on moonshine, wine, and beer. Recipes calling for everything from "several squirrels" to "Tennessee truffles," otherwise known as ramps. A section on "The Art of Growing" in the southern mountains. And lots of amazing old photographs of places all around where I grew up and where I live now. This is so far up my alley it's out the other side.

In the 12 or so hours since MF kindly lent me her copy (seeing the pain it would cause me if she didn't), I have spent most of my waking hours falling in love with this book. I stayed up late reading Christopher snippets about the history of wild grapes in North Carolina, and opened it up first thing this morning to read about possum hunting.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As I try out recipes, I will post some of them, and I'll write more about Dabney's exhaustive survey of mountain food culture as I read and re-read it, I am sure.

On a related note (food traditions, books I love, recommended reading for cold days and nights), I was re-united last night with my copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. I had apparently lent it out to MF long ago and forgotten. Christopher has had to hear me lament its absence many times in recent months, only to discover that it was safe and sound in West Asheville all along. I was very excited when MF whipped out my copy last night.

This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is only 187 pages from cover to cover, but it is highly concentrated. Like a thick mole or miso paste, it provides more flavor, substance, and hours of enjoyment than you might imagine. Wild Fermentation is chock full of recipes, food histories, stories from the modern food underground, philosophy, politics, and food lore from many traditions.

Wild Fermentation is the book that I used as a guide when I first began making krauts and brine pickles, ginger brews, kombucha, and other fermented foods. It is the single indispensable resource for people embarking on fermentation adventures, in my opinion, and an invaluable cache of fabulous food facts and folk traditions.

So there are two recommendations for winter reading. Though I am a big fan of libraries, these are books that I think it is worth owning. My copy of Wild Fermentation is well-worn already -- it has the creases and stains to prove that it's a book I pull off the shelf and use in the kitchen all the time. I am going to purchase Smokehouse post haste, and have a feeling it will assume a similarly revered and beloved status in my kitchen.

Happy winter, happy eating, and happy reading!

~~~~

A note on the title of this post: Scuppernongs and Muscadines are wild grapes that grew rampantly in North Carolina before and at the time of European settlement. According to Joseph Dabney, they were still to be found in abundance growing wild in these parts as recently as the 1940s, and were used for wine-making, desserts, and an amazing-sounding ferment made from wild grapes and molasses, apparently based on a Cherokee tradition. Switchel is a delicious home-made soft drink with molasses and ginger, a fine recipe for which can be found in Wild Fermentation.

Local Protein

Yesterday we harvested the first big batch of dry black beans -- Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Beans
(see my previous post for more information on these beautiful and delicious heirloom beans).

I remember my amazement when I first discovered that to grow dry beans, you just let the pods dry on the vine and pick and shell...how simple and satisfying! We recently ate the last of last summer's dry beans, and are beginning to pick and shell beans from this year's garden now.

Here's what the pods look like drying on the vine (top photo) - they go from green to purple to purplish-black to black or brown. Here's a basket of harvested dry beans (above).

We could jar them up right away after shelling, but we are drying them on screens (below) to make sure no moisture gets trapped in the jars with them.

We bought a pound of seed from Seed Savers Exchange in the Spring, and had intended to save some beans for seed next year, BUT it appears that the seed is not pure (left). The white seed coat likely points to the seeds having crossed with another variety one generation back (the parent generation of the seeds that we bought). Since we have found one pod (so far) with beans with a white seed coat, so we'll have to contact SSE to let them know it appears the seed we bought was crossed, and we'll need to buy fresh seeds next year in order to preserve the heirloom variety uncorrupted.

Eventually, our goal is to have lots of these to give away and sell (local vegetable protein!) and to ferment these and other dry beans in tempeh and misos. We also hope to save seeds of this variety (once we are sure the seed is not crossed) to share and replant every year...stay tuned!

Indigenous Permaculture

My dear friend Tyson introduced me to this organization, run by a friend of his who is a certified indigenous permaculture designer (wow, who knew there was such a thing!):

The Red Earth Action Project

And here's an organization that runs a certification program in Indigenous Permaculture.

It's interesting terminology, since one of the critiques I've heard of permaculture is along the lines of: "Some white dude from Australia didn't invent these concepts, he just named the things that inherently sustainable indigenous cultures have been doing forever!" I've long thought that many of the principles of permaculture are old, old ways practiced for thousands of years before the advent of modern farming. For instance, "food forests," or polyculture, which just means that rather than planting a uniform bed of one type of crop you plant a whole bunch of diverse plants together. Diversity, it turns out, is more robust and sustainable than homogenized sameness. True in human society as in the natural world.

Above: polyculture in our garden-- common sage, zinnias, and purple jalepeno peppers.

Below: our Three Sisters bed - an ancient tradition of biointensive companion planting/polyculture.

As much as our work here has been influenced by permaculturists, I've been resistant to using that label because of a sense that the ancient practices of growing food that we are rediscovering are far deeper than "permaculture" or any other modern school of thought. All of this reminds me of Farmers of 40 Centuries, which, although focused on China, Japan, and Korea, is all about ancient traditional methods of growing food.

I took a great class at the Organic Growers School a couple of years ago, taught by Jeff Ashton, where I learned that most ancient traditions of growing food are based on biointensive (lots of green stuff in a small space) raised beds with soild heavily amended with manures. Ashton referenced Farmers of 40 Centuries as a great summary of some of those traditional methods.

So call it permaculture, call it indigenous agriculture, call it biointensive polyculture, whatever! Regardless of the technical-sounding terminology, it's all about building the soil, paying attention, celebrating diversity rather than sterile monoculture, and working with the dirt and the sun and the rain to create something beautiful and nourishing.















Above: keyhole bed planted with amaranth, peppers, dill, okra, marigolds, beans, lettuce, cucumbers, eggplant, strawflowers, nasturtiums, and sunflowers.

Below: raised beds in our garden....bellflower, majoram, parsley, bee balm, chamomile, calendula, and basil in the foreground; black beans, crookneck squash, beets, onions, basil, broccoli, and tomatoes are in the background.

Trail of Tears Beans

This year, for the 4th or 5th season, I am planting shiny black beans known as Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans. We will let the beans dry on the vine and harvest them in the late fall for delicious dry black beans. These beans are close to my heart, and I love to plant them and share seeds because their ancestors came from this place, and they are gifts from the people who lived in these mountains before me.


They carry the history of a people that survived brutality, dislocation, and degradation. And planting these beans represents to me a homecoming of a land-based, earth-honoring tradition in these mountains.

In 1839 the US government forced most of the people of the Cherokee nation to walk west from Georgia, North Carolina, northeastern Alabama, and Tennessee to what is now Oklahoma. The distance traveled by most of the people was about 1,000 miles, with the vast majority of the travelers making the entire journey by foot. The forced march, now called the Trail of Tears, began in October of 1839. Cherokee people walked the thousand miles over the course of a harsh winter. The walk began after many had already been held for months in internment camps, where conditions were degrading, violent, and cruel. By the time the removal was over, roughly one-third of the men, women, and children had died.

When the time of internment and removal began, many Cherokee people were forced to pack quickly. People took only what they could carry, often having to decide in a hurry what was most important to them that could be taken on the journey to an unknown new home. Some people carried seeds.

The seeds of dry black beans now called the Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Bean were grown in the mountains of Western North Carolina for thousands of years. Someone carried them on the Trail of Tears. A Cherokee man in Oklahoma donated seeds from this bean variety to the Seed Savers Exchange and so we are able to bring a
few back to the mountains to plant in our river valley, where Cherokee people and their ancestors lived for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.

The Cherokee people, and the other peoples of the decimated cultures that remained after the European invasion of the Americas saved the seeds that had been planted by their ancestors: corn, squash, herbs and flowers, grains. And beans: hundreds, maybe thousands of ancient varieties of beans.

Skimming through the Seed Savers Exchange catalog it is easy to see the fingerprints of First Nation seed-keepers:

Hopi Gold: "another strain guarded as ancient legacy by Hopi elder James Koorshongsie." Hyote: "from Violet Ruben, Seneca, Tonawanda Reserve." Seneca Stripe: " via Geraldene Green, Seneca Faith Keeper, Cuttoragus Reserve." Speckled Algonquin: "via Tamarack Song of WI, originally from Algonquin Indians of upper Midwest." Taos Pueblo Red: "Native American name is Ta-pie-eh-na, red-streaked pod, red seed, on of traditional foods cooked for boys during training in the Kiva. . .from the late Old Joe Concha."

What is our responsibility to these elders? How can we honor and give gratitude to James Koorshongsie, Violet Ruben, Geraldine Green, Tamarack Song, Old Joe Concha, and all of the unnamed figures in the largely unwritten history of the food on our tables?

How do we retrace the steps of these ancestors and recover the intimacy with the natural world that was at the core of their systems of living? By planting a bean, covering it with dirt, giving it water and sun. By encouraging all of the life in the soil and air and water that nurtures the seed: worms, beneficial insects, microscopic life forms. By cultivating intimate relationships with the plants that feed us and the earth, air, water, and light that feed them. By preserving the seeds that sustain human life for another generation.

Nurturing the small bean plants in my garden, I honor the lost, forgotten, fragmented, and violated cultures and people that stand at the beginning of an unbroken chain of life between the tiny green plants in my garden and the plants grown by peoples of the Americas before European invasion.

Harvesting the beans in the fall, I invoke and offer gratitude to the people who stewarded, protected, and cultivated the bean-ancestors of my garden plants. I say a prayer to the earth for the restoration of human relationships with the natural world.

Planting beans in my garden, I give thanks.

The Swananoa Valley river bottom land where we are growing food, where people have grown food for thousands of years....

---

Three Sisters

"A long time ago there were three sisters who lived together in a field. These sisters were quite different from one another in their size and way of dressing. The little sister was so young that she could only crawl at first, and she was dressed in green. The second sister wore a bright yellow dress, and she had a way of running off by herself when the sun shone and the soft wind blew in her face. The third was the eldest sister, standing always very straight and tall above the other sisters and trying to protect them. She wore a pale green shawl, and she had long, yellow hair that tossed about her head in the breeze. There was one way the sisters were all alike, though. They loved each other dearly, and they always stayed together. This made them very strong."

~Lois Thomas oral history. In: Indian Legends of Eastern Canada, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Toronto (Ontario). Education Division, 1969.

Zephyr Squash

We planted the first of this year's "Three Sisters" beds -- a 27-foot bed of Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Beans and Zephyr summer squash (above) along with some winter squash (Waltham Butternut), sunflowers, and a couple of edible gourd varieties.

Prepping the first bed for the three sisters and their gourd cousins

The traditional three sisters, planted together, are corn, beans, and squash. All three have been grown in the Americas for thousands of years, and the three were often grown together in traditional Native American polyculture gardens.

Across North America from present-day Mexico to Canada, there were traditional agricultural practices centered around squash and her two sister staple crops. A practical and sophisticated example of low-impact, high-yield companion planting, three sisters plantings provided a nutritional complement for the peoples that grew them. Polyculture (the opposite of monoculture) prevented pest infestation and the symbiotic relationship between the three plants aided in the growth of all three, for higher yields and healthier crops.

In our garden, we substituted sunflowers for corn for a variation on the Three Sisters tradition --sunflowers are also indigenous to the Americas, and were grown as living trellises for beans in the same way that corn was. We're growing varieties with edible seeds, and hoping the flowers will help bring birds and beneficials to the garden. Gourds, which have a similar look and growing habit to squash, were not native to the Americas, but were grown in Europe for about 2,000 years before Columbus. The gourds are a bigger departure from the ancient 3 Sisters tradition, but the gourd varieties we're growing are really interesting heirlooms (Cucuzzi and Sweet Honey Sponge), so it was worth not being 3 Sisters fundamentalists.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Beans

Beans were domesticated in the Americas more than 3,500 years ago, the youngest of the famous "three sisters" cultivated by indigenous people on the American continents. The older sisters, corn and squash, have been cultivated for at least 5,500 years in the Americas.

Waltham Butternut Squash

Ancestors of today's pumpkins and sweet baking squashes, hard and hearty winter squashes, zucchinis, and crook- and straight-necked summer squashes were cultivated on North American soil at least a thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids were built.

With her two sisters beans and corn, wild and cultivated squash in endless variety was savored, nurtured, celebrated, and honored as "that which sustains" by the indigenous peoples of the Americas. For thousands of years before European colonization, the three sister plant spirits were cherished as green, growing relatives in the family of all living things. Sacred stories, symbols, art, and rituals surrounding the sisters were woven into the spiritual practices of many First Nation cultures.

In some versions of the creation story told by Iroquois peoples, the three sisters were daughters of the daughter of the first woman, Skywoman, who walked across the back of a great turtle, scattering seeds and roots, creating the earth. Other traditions honored a sacred site, a place then called Ogarechny Mountain, where legend held that beans, corn, and squash were first found growing, planted as a gift by a woman from the sky. Still other ancient tales traced the plants to three women bearing gifts from the south: the foods to sustain human life.

The Three Sisters were not only functional staple food crops--they were integral parts of a belief system that honored plants and animals as relatives and understood human beings as part of a community of life. For some accounts of traditional growing methods for the three sisters, there's a great book I'd recommend: A People's Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living: Health, Environment, Agriculture, Native Traditions edited by Gregory Cajete (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1999).