If you have never done one before and had success with it then I strongly encourage you to skip the idea. It is one of those concepts that sounds good in theory but just doesn't work in practice because the crops used in an American Indian 3 sisters garden were very different in form and growth then the varieties are today. They were very tall, very sturdy corn varieties, winter squash varieties only and old fashioned slow growing flat bean varieties. As trev said everything was harvested all at one time in the fall. There have been many past discussions here about the limitations and problems associated with the so-called 3 sisters garden and very, very, few success stories. The search will pull them up for you if interested. It honestly offers no benefits and you'll have far more success using traditional gardening methods. I bought corn (peaches and cream), blue lake green beans, zucchini and a yellow summer squash (which I only want one plant of each because I think they're gross, it's the non-cooking people in my house who want them), two kinds of cucumbers, a pickling one and a slicing one. I plan on pickling the cucumbers and green beans so I want a lot of those. That is an awfully large amount of crops for such a small space. You really need to reconsider your crop choices or add additional gardening space. ie: grow the squash and cucumbers in containers. Sorry as I know this isn't what you wanted to hear. Dave

On your mulch crops, I have read that part of planting the squash as a border around and through the other crops was that raccoons don't like the prickly stems and are deterred from getting into the planted area. Well, I've never had raccoons eat my winter squash, anyway. I've had whole plantings of sweet corn stripped, but you aren't planting those, anyway. Anyway, you have a lot of melons mentioned as mulch crops. Two words: Raccoon Bait! Raccoons can smell ripening cantaloupe miles away, and they don't mind eating it the day before you would have considered it perfectly ripe! Probably the same for watermelon, but I lived near Rocky Ford, Colorado, known far and wide for cantaloupe. ;-) When I was a kid farmers used to hire us to walk around their fields at night near harvest, throwing firecrackers around the edges of the fields (not AT the raccoons or into the fields, so as not to damage any fruit). Firecrackers were illegal in Colorado except for this one purpose, and we could get them from the Extension Office if we were growing melons. All of which is to say, grow squash around the edges of your garden, letting them vine together as much as possible. Keep the melons in the center, where they might not attract as much mapache (raccoon) attention as they would on the edges. And you might plan to camp out in your garden near harvest. Catherine

Bon, With regard to your specific questions: I am assuming that when you use the term squash you mean winter squash since it is vining and most summer squash plants are more bush-like. Corn and beans perform best when planted early enough in spring that heat doesn't negatively impact pollination. I try to have all my corn harvested before the end of July, and I generally don't plant a succession crop of sweet corn for fall because of the heat. When I do plant fall corn, it is planted in a new area. Three Sisters gardens do not lend themselves well to succession planting once they are growing because you have to disturb the roots of the existing plants in order to plant a succession crop. You may or may not find that the Three Sisters garden remains standing in high winds. In my experience, without a windbreak (and sometimes even with a windbreak), the corn is more likely to be brought down by the wind, not less likely, because the weight of the bean vines tend to bring down corn stalks even in the absence of wind unless you plant a really, really sturdy corn variety that has huge, strong stalks and gets really tall. If the wind blows the corn plants over onto the top of the squash plants, it is almost impossible to straighten up the tangled mess of bean vine-covered corn plants, and your squash plants will be damaged by the corn and beans being blown down on top of them. Often it breaks the leaves. You also likely will walk on and break your squash vines while attempting to straighten up your corn plants. If okra is to be planted in your Three Sisters Garden as a fourth sister, it needs to be planted far away enough from everything else and especially the winter squash plants that you can harvest okra every day or every other day without trampling any of your three or four sisters. The marigolds likely will be shaded out by the squash plants which always get huge and run everywhere, including into places where you don't want winter squash. I have had winter squash and pumpkin plants (pumpkins, for the record, are winter squash) run from one side of the garden to another, burying every other plant in their path. I try to plant them near the garden fence and mostly train them to grow outside into the pasture beyond the fence instead of into other areas where I don't want them. I have a love-hate relationship with marigolds. I love way they look, but in my garden they are spider mite magnets so I use them as a trap crop, letting them grow until they have a heavy infestation of spider mites, and then I pull up the plants, put them in a trash bag, tie it closed and put it into a trash can with a lid. I don't want any of those spider mites escaping before the trash is hauled away. I generally get better results planting short cosmos like Cosmic Orange or Cosmic Yellow instead of marigolds. They attract the beneficial insects and are not as prone to get spider mites. I have grown some form of a Three Sisters Garden almost every year (this is my 14th spring garden here, or 15 if you count the little one I planted before we even broke ground for the house) although often it is a 4 or 5 Sisters garden, and I've almost never done it the same way twice because I haven't been entirely happy with its performance in one way or another. As George said, most pole beans will bring down most kinds of sweet corn because of their rampant growth. I have had some luck with Texas Honey June, an heirloom sweet corn from Texas that gets pretty large and tall, but even it will bend under the load of heavy bean plants. Mexican Black corn does better, and some of the field corns in the link George provided would be better than Mexican Black. Seneca Red Stalker and Mixed Colors Broom Corn (grown for ornamental seed heads) have worked well for me in a Three or Four Sisters garden. I like the Three Sisters garden for many reasons. Growing squash amongst the corn plants seems to help keep raccoons out of the corn to a certain extent, though it doesn't work every year---only most years or only to some degree. However, the beans are the problem area. I now plant them only on the northernmost row of the corn because it is just too hard to harvest the beans otherwise without trampling the squash plants, and it can complicate harvesting the ears of corn because the vines will wrap themselves around the ears. Instead of planting pole beans on all 4 sides of the corn, I put the pole beans on a woven wire fence and let them form the wind break that will protect everything else. One of my favorite Three Sisters gardens contained Early Sunglow and Dwarf Blue Jade corn because I could harvest them fast, and I planted bush beans and half runners, and for squash I planted small sugar pie pumpkin. The corn was planted in late March and harvested in latest May or early June. The beans were planted in April after the corn was a foot or two tall and they were harvested in June and July. The small sugar pie pumpkins were planted in May and harvested beginning in August. So, each of them grew into one another's space up to a point, but it wasn't a big tangled mess at corn harvest time. When I plant, I don't plant in little mounds or hills like you're describing. My corn is in a big block in the center of the planting area. I divide the corn planting area in half, leaving a big wide path down the middle of it. Into that path I plant two winter squash plants, usually Seminole because it is squash vine borer resistant. I usually plant 4 more Seminole plants, one on each side of the Three Sistsers garden, and I plant them 4 to 6 feet away from the corn. Eventually they'll infiltrate the corn bed anyway, but by then the corn is pretty tall and well-established and, sometimes, already being harvested. Timing of the elements of the Three Sisters garden is very important. I usually plant corn the earliest for several reasons. First, it tolerates cool soil better than beans and squash do. Secondly, it needs to get some good height to it before the beans sprout or the beans can outgrow it. Third, I want the corn roots very well-established before the bean roots start competing with them for nutrients. I plant the beans secondly, and don't plant them until the corn is 1 to 2 feet tall. They sprout fast in the warmer soil and grow rapidly so the corn needs that head start so they don't overwhelm it. I prefer using half-runner beans or southern peas that are "supposed to be" semi-vining types. I use pink eye purple hull a lot. While they will stay shorter if there's nothing to climb, PEPH peas will climb pretty tall when they have something to climb so they do well on corn stalks. If I want to plant a tall pole bean in the Three Sisters Garden, I either plant the pole beans on the garden fence, or I plant a row of tall sunflowers between the Three Sisters garden and plant the beans to climb the sunflowers. That works only "ok". Many sunflowers are somewhat alleopathic and that can work against the beans. I also stake each tall sunflower either to the fence or to 8' tall dark green t-posts to keep the wind from knocking them down, and to enable them to support heavy pole bean plants. The Winter Squash seeds need warm soil to sprout and they go into the ground last. Despite that, the squash vines are rampant growers and will overwhelm everything else at some point. I'm not saying don't plant a Three Sisters garden. I love my Three Sisters plantings because they allow me to grow three or more veggies in a place where many people only grow one. However, they are hard to work with. You have to weed the garden a LOT until the squash plants are large enough to shade the ground, although heavy mulching helps reduce the weeding task to some degree. Sunflowers are often my fourth sister because you can plant them and forget about them other than staking them as they grow taller. My fifth sister usually is nasturtiums or buckwheat or both. They attract beneficial insects that help with pest control. I plant them around the 4 edges of the blocks of corn. With your other goals of saving seeds, note that George told you how many plants are required to save seeds and most people don't have space for that many corn plants. Unless you have a large deep freeze or intend to can corn, you don't want to plant 300 corn plants because that has the potential to give you as many as 600 ears of corn and a family cannot eat that much fresh corn fast enough. You could plant that many corn plants if you want to produce your own corn meal, but that requires a machine that will grind the meal. If you want to grow in the most efficient and effective manner, read John Jeavons' book "How To Grow More Vegetables...." which I have linked below. If you follow his recommendations closely and carefully, which includes a focus on double digging and soil amendment and growing your own compost crops, you'll be stunned by the large yields your garden will give you. However, you won't get those huge yields the first year. What will happen is that as the soil gets better and better and you hone your skills as a gardener, the yield will get better every year. I had trouble in the beginning adapting to his recommended planting patterns and spacing because I had just tried Square Foot Gardening for 2 or 3 years and had all of that method's spacing memorized. John Jeavons planting patterns are more complicated. You basically have to picture each plant's space needs as a circle, and you plant each veggie or herb far enough away from the next closest one so that their 'circles' just touch one another's edges once they are full-sized. That allows the plants to shade the ground completely, helping keep it cool and moist and reducing weeds due to a lack of sunlight. You do have to amend your soil well, though, or there's not enough nutrients in the soil to supply the biointensive plantings with what they need. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: How To Grow More Vegetables......

I have not done SFG with the Three Sisters, but I have done the Three Sisters Garden. I did it in previous years with hills (3 foot diameter) separated by about 5 feet on center. The corn (6-8) went in a center ring ~ 1 foot diameter. The beans (10-12) went in a ring outside the corn diameter ~ 2 feet, planted about 2 weeks after the corn. The squash goes in the outside ring, the side of the hill, planted at the same time as the beans. Some will tell you that the beans will rip the corn out, some will tell you that the beans will wrap too tightly around the corn. The Native Americans developed this method, so it DOES work. The issue is plant choice! The traditional method was for dried corn, dried beans, and winter squash. This was how they made it through the winter. If you want to use sweet corn, green beans and summer squash, know that you are making adjustments to the method. Expect to encounter difficulties. For myself, I did all three variations, and had some success. Enough that I have continued to try it. I got about 12 ears of sweet corn out of only 4 hills. I got a good supply of beans, for as long as I continued to pick the pods. I stopped picking the pods once the corn was finished, as I wanted to plant NEW things in their space. The zucchini that was at the bottom was AWESOME (as zucchini usually is)! It just kept coming and coming. Eventually, I got tired of zucchini. I pulled it at the same time as the corn and beans, so that I could plant some fall crops. It works, but be prepared for some bumps along the way. As far as doing it with SFG this is what I would do. Plant them in long rows. 1' x 4'. Plant in the center of the 1' - but...Try 3 corn stalks (plant 2 or 3 seeds per spot, and thin to 1) per 4 sq/ft (plant them where the dividers go). Plant 4 beans around each corn stalk, and thin to the strongest two. Plant squash in the ends of that 4 sqft row. Then repeat for as many row as you want. More rows will give you a better chance of germinating good ears of corn. You can plant corn closer than 1 foot, as close as 6 inches. The soil just has to be ready to handle that much corn!