If you want to grow your own food sustainably, this Indigenous farming method could help you create a thriving, high-yield garden in a small space.
One knowledgeable gardener took to TikTok to highlight the Native agricultural practice, which can increase the health and quality of crops while providing more food.
The scoop
Seb (@solarity.acres) of Solarity in British Columbia posted a video highlighting how planting symbiotic crops together can benefit the land and your dinner plate. The Indigenous farming practice they detailed is called Three Sisters, and it involves planting squash, beans, and corn together, creating a beneficial polyculture.
@solarity.acres 👇 Three sisters WORKS. Our industrial agricultural system has billions of dollars of investment into RnD, GMOs, fertilizers and the “best” scientists. And yet, Three Sisters consistently and reproducibly grows more biomass per acre than a monoculture. It also does this WITHOUT fertilizers, pesticides and it actually improves the health of the soil every year. How? Three Sisters leverages “niche complementarity,” where each plant benefits the others: beans fix nitrogen, corn provides a structure for beans to climb, and squash acts as ground cover, reducing weeds and moisture loss. 🤓 Fun fact: there was also a 4th sister that was sometimes used. Can you guess what it is? (Hint, it’s a tall flower that was used to help attract pollinators and beneficial insects) The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) developed this system in what is now called North America. Using keen observation, and understanding the connected nature of all things, the Iroquois were able to develop a system that produced more nutrition per acre, didn’t deplete the soils, helped biodiversity and stored more carbon in the soil. They also figured out nixtamalization, which transforms corn’s nutritional profile and makes the vitamin B3 available to humans. Without this, corn on it’s own would eventually deprive your body of B3. Polycultures can provide all the nutrients humans actually need to survive. Growing polycultures makes sense if you want to feed humans. Growing monocultures makes sense if you want to raise corn futures on the stock exchange. So why are we still growing monocultures? We’re losing top soil at alarming rates, causing algae blooms in the ocean, and the nutrient and mineral content of our vegetables continues to drop even as we use MORE fertilzers. Something has to change. Indigenous cultures across the globe had already figured out regenerative systems, well before colonization. So why are we not learning from their successes? Why do we continue down this destructive path and ignore indigenous knowledge? #permaculture #companionplanting #threesisters #organicgardening #regenerativeagriculture ♬ original sound – Seb 💚
Seb said: “Three Sisters leverages ‘niche complementarity,’ where each plant benefits the others: beans fix nitrogen, corn provides a structure for beans to climb, and squash acts as ground cover, reducing weeds and moisture loss.”
The planting method was developed by the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois or Six Nations. It’s highly revered for its benefits and sustainability.
“Using keen observation, and understanding the connected nature of all things, the Iroquois were able to develop a system that produced more nutrition per acre, didn’t deplete the soils, helped biodiversity and stored more carbon in the soil,” Seb said.
How it’s working
Using Three Sisters as a growth strategy maximizes land use and crop yield while improving soil quality, reducing the need for harmful pesticides, and lowering environmental strain.
But many commenters on the video argued that Three Sisters wouldn’t be viable on today’s commercial farms, as harvesting the interconnected plants with major agricultural machinery would be difficult or impossible.
Seb, however, insisted that supporting Big Agriculture isn’t the ideal way to raise crops for human consumption. The gardener lamented the realities of Big Agriculture and its reliance on monoculture, saying that Three Sisters “consistently and reproducibly grows more biomass per acre than a monoculture.”
“Growing polycultures makes sense if you want to feed humans,” he wrote in the video caption. “Growing monocultures makes sense if you want to raise corn futures on the stock exchange.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture agrees, stating that while Three Sisters is often thought of as a way to improve small gardens, its “historical value lay in larger-scale implementations designed to nurture and sustain entire communities.”
“[Three Sisters] is a sophisticated, sustainable planting system that provided long-term soil fertility and a healthy diet to generations of Native Americans,” the USDA says.
What people are saying
Even with some detractors in the comments of Seb’s video, many viewers were keen to learn about the Indigenous method.
“I always knew that they were planted together to be symbiotic, but I never knew specifically how,” one commenter wrote. “That is so cool.”
“The nitrogen is fixed at the bean’s roots by symbiotic bacteria,” another commenter wrote. “Life thrives when they work together.”
“Indigenous wisdom — it’s their turn,” a third commenter wrote. “They are the ones who will save this planet.”
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