Three Sisters - Beginning of July

Already it's the beginning of July and the Three Sisters Garden is waaaay ahead of schedule!  The corn is well over my head - and I'm 5/8"!

Three Sisters Garden fronted by 3 zucchini plants

The tassels are fully extended now and cobs are starting to peep out of the stalks.

It won't belong before we start boiling the water!

The beans are running riot through the cornstalks and busily fixing nitrogen into the soil.  There are no flowers yet, but I'm sure they'll be present in the next few days.

Beans and corn well joined

Squash vines are escaping the beds.  All of the vines have little squashes forming.  I can see I'll have to find a lot of friends to gift with presents of butternut, delicata, pattypan and spaghetti - as well as zucchini!  We'll never be able to deal with all this produce - especially since my husband is a confirmed squash-hater with the exception of butternut squash pie - recipe coming later.  I'm searching out zucchini recipes and will post the ones which are successful.

Butternut squash escaping its bed

I put a lot of the credit for this amazing growth to a couple of factors:  SeaSoil generously added to the beds and the Remay cloth which protected them at the beginning of the season when the weather was cool.  The little corn plant which was excluded from this protection is considerably behind it's brethren.

The excluded corn plant is drooping to the far left.

 So far, this experiment seems to be an outstanding success.  I'm not sure how it will play out next year since the bed will have to be dismantled this fall - the wood is rotting through as you can see from the picture with the squash vine.  At this point I'm thinking of using all three 4x4 concrete beds to house the Three Sisters Garden for next year.  There's lots of room for squash to roam in back there.  We'll replace the wooden beds with one long concrete bed over the winter.