Collaborative Community Garden
Photography by Sarah Dyer.
This week we prepared another bed and planted-in yellow onions started from seed by Caleb. I’ve never planted onions before, so I was especially excited to try my hand with them. The planting process was a bit tedious, but many hands made light work and we were able to finish fairly quickly.
“Good intentions are not enough. They’ve never put an onion in the soup yet.”
Sonya Levien
Caleb spent some time this week explaining solarization, which is the next tool we are learning to use for reclaiming this community space. Soil solarization is an method of using the sun’s power to control pests such as bacteria, insects, and weeds in the soil. The process involves covering the ground with a transparent polyethylene cover, to trap solar energy. It’s like the inverse of occultation, and better for warmer weather. It is important that the tarp remains as close to the soil surface as possible, and that the edges are kept tight to the ground so that there is little air escaping/entering the area. Caleb plans to solarize several unused plots within the space, which will hopefully allow us the opportunity to continue planting. By caring for these “abandoned” beds, we are controlling overgrowth of weeds in the plots, which will make planting in them next year infinity easier.
Do’patsa Makihi’kě: Four-Vegetables-Mixed
Ashley Lewis digging a sunken path through half of the bed. 
Ashley Lewis surveying our finished garden beds.
After weeks of double digging and weeding, we are finally ready to begin prepping our bed layout. After researching about half a dozen methods of planting the Three Sisters and creating a theoretical plan, we arrived prepared to to dig in paths and build the necessary soil structures.
As we pulled off our occultation tarp, the ground writhed. Under the plastic sheet were over two dozen garter snakes. We spent about 15 minutes chasing them out of our plot. One of the tinier snakes actually tried to bit our garden tools several times. Eventually, our friends vacated the property, but they are hopefully hiding nearby to eat our pests.
“We Hidatsas began our tilling season with the rake. We used two kinds, both of native make; one was made of a black-tailed deer horn, the other was of wood.
Of the two, we thought the horn rake the better, because it did not grow worms, as we said. Worms often appear in a garden and do much damage. It is a tradition with us that worms are afraid of horn; and we believed if we used black-tailed deer horn rakes, not many worms would be found in our fields that season.
We believed wooden rakes caused worms in the corn. These worms, we thought, came out of the wood in the rakes; just how this was, we did not know. However, horn rakes were heavy and rather hard to make; and for this reason, the handier and more easily made wooden rakes were more commonly used.
All this that I tell you of our tools and fields is our own lore. White men taught us none of it. All that I have told you, we Indians knew since the world began.”
–MAXI’DIWIAC
Gilbert L. Wilson: Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden, Page 107
We started on the east side of the bed, where we dug in deep paths and used the excess dirt to build-up mounds for planting, we combined Wampanoag and Zuni techniques. Alternating Large mounds for corn and beans with small mounds for squash, we left space for planting beneficial herbs and flowers. The deep paths will aid in care and harvesting on that side of the garden, as Hooker’s Sweet corn is fairly short; by lowering the path, it becomes easier to reach all the plants for care and harvest. We were able to put in eight corn/bean mounds and four smaller mounds for squash, and we moved the straw to mulch around the hills.
On the west side of the bed, we are modeling the Hidatsa field layout, in which rows of corn and beans are interplanted with squash between sets of rows. We created an incline up from our deep path, which makes walking to ground level a bit easier. On either side of the path will be parallel row of beans and corn. Four squash plants will be put in about 1.5′ off the western edge of the bed and trained to grow into the rows. Remaining space will be intercropped with pollinator friendly flowers.
Image from seedsavers.org
Along the entire length of the north side of the plot, we will plant sunflowers. Ashley bought the our sunflower seeds from seedlinked, and they came as a collection of three heritage varieties, curated by the Organic Seed Alliance. Out of the three, we decide to plant a vearity called Tarahumara. Tarahumara sunflowers are a traditional variety developed by the Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico. They are tall (7′-11’) plants and produce a single, large (up to 24” across) golden flower with white seeds. The seeds of Tarahumara sunflowers are large, plump, and delicious.