The 1,000-Year-Old Appalachian 'Three Sisters' Garden (That Tractors and Hybrid Corn Ended)

🔗 90 things every Appalachian grandmother knew about the ground. How many are left in your family? https://burlsizemore.com/porch-almanac The spring I was eight, my grandfather dropped four grains of corn in every hill on the slope behind our house, came back three weeks later and planted beans right up against the little stalks, and then put pumpkins in between. The neighbors said he was going to choke his corn to death. That little field fed eleven of us for a whole year. He learned it from his grandmother, and she learned it from hers, and somewhere far back up that line it came from the Cherokee women who kept fields in these hills long before anybody else was here. The corn holds up the beans, the beans feed the ground, and the pumpkin leaves keep the weeds down and the dirt cool. Years later a professor at Cornell went and weighed it, and what she found made me set my coffee cup down. In this video I walk you through all of it the way Papaw did it: when the white oak leaves are the size of a squirrel ear, why four grains and never five, the old rhyme he said over every hill, the seed corn braided in the smokehouse rafters and the bean seed in a gourd on a nail, and the night the coons came. And then what killed it. By the time I was grown there was not one field like it left on our creek, and I watched every step of how that happened. Not one of those women ever set any of it down on paper. So I got out a pencil and a ledger, and every evening after the dishes I wrote down one thing, until there were ninety: what the old people of these mountains knew about working the ground, from saving seed to putting a garden to bed for the winter, and why each one works. I am Burl Sizemore. Thank you for staying with me clear to the end of the row. https://burlsizemore.com/porch-almanac