Three Sisters Follow-Up

We have a new Excalibur food dehydrator! Just in time, too... with all the autumn foraged mushrooms we have been harvesting, as well as the fresh herbs we are pulling out of the garden in advance of frost, we needed a quality drying system that would allow us to control the temperature. This model 3900 features 9 drying racks and a temperature control down to 105 degrees. We opted not to pay for a built in timer, since we could always plug the dehydrator into a wall timer.

Our goldendoodle, Barley,
checking out the bucket of corn.

This new toy will not only allow us to better control drying temperatures for delicate foods, it will bridge the gap until I can build my imagined combo solar wax melter/ dehydrator, which should be able to handle more sturdy produce.

Anyway- we harvested the Kentucky Butcher corn from the three sisters garden yesterday, and got a nice big bushel and a half of corn on the cob. This will need to be shucked and removed from the cobb, then dried down to below 11% for long-term storage. We found an interesting article on using a microwave to test moisture content, so we'll try to verify where we are before we put the corn into Mylar bags and buckets. If all goes well, this beautiful multicolored corn should give us nutrient-dense cornbread until next season (and maybe enough corn for a no-spit chicha).

Of course, the beans are done, but we also checked on the squash. Several of the butternut squash are starting to harden, and a couple of the loofah are beginning to dry out. We just hope old man winter will give us a few more weeks to let them finish. At the same time, there are TONS of squash flowers and baby fruits for both of these, so we're going to saute the flowers and treat the fruits as a summer squash. 

Baby Butternut and Loofah

Corn kernels in our new dehydrator

What we learned from our 3-Sisters Garden experience: 

• Corn should be direct-sown and planted thinly enough to give the squash adequate light. Ours was planted 18" O/C over the entire space, and we simply substituted a squash hill for a corn plant at 4' intervals. This dense planting pattern prevented the squash from really fruiting until the corn had died back. Next time, we will plant the corn in blocks and leave plenty of space for the squash between those blocks.
• When the corn is knee-high, it should be side dressed with composted manure, then the beans and squash can be planted. It's okay to transplant the squash, although there is probably no substantive difference in transplants and direct sown seeds.
• If the corn tassles, that's it: the corn is not going to get any taller. If the corn stalks are undersized, you should expect undersized ears and kernels. The seed we purchased was as large as a man's thumbnail and the plants were supposed to get twelve to eighteen feet high. Since we fertilized late, our corn only got as high as eight feet and the eight to ten inch ears yielded kernels about the size of a pinky nail. 

If we are able to harvest the loofah, we'll do an update on processing it. Otherwise, that's it for this year's Three Sisters Garden.