In article ,
Gordon wrote:

Doug Freyburger wrote in news:jbm94o$gb6$1@dont-
email.me:

Gordon wrote:

A friend told me about the Three Sisters growing method.
Apearently It comes from the Native Americans who would
grow Corn, Beans and Squash together. The corn stalks
would provide a trellis for the beans to grow on, and
the squash would grow on the ground and provide cover
to control the weeds. Sounds intresting.

Anyone else heard of it? Anyone tried it?

I've heard of it as a nutritionally complete though boring system. You
can grow those crops and live on them for years without getting ill.
Add a small amount of hunted meat and it's livable. I've never tried
planting them together.


chuckle
Doug,
I'm just talking about a way to grow some vegies. Not a diet.
I have a grocery store down the road (several actually) that
provides most of my food. But gardening is a nice diversion,
and I can eat the produce from it. I doubt that I can live off
my small garden plot.

And the food from your garden can be poison free, local (no fossil fuel
required to get it to you.), and fresh (all nutrients at peak levels).
Let's see your grocery match that.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...als/dp/0143038
583/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1

BIG ORGANIC * 179


The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in
the United States (about as much as
automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil
fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.
And while it is true that organic farmers don't spread fertilizers made
from natural gas or spray pesticides made from petroleum, industrial
organic farmers often wind up burning more diesel fuel than their
conventional counterparts: in trucking bulky loads of compost across the
countryside and weeding their fields, a particularly energy-intensive
process involving extra irrigation (to germinate the weeds before
planting) and extra cultivation. All told, growing food organically uses
about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, according
to David Pimentel, though that savings disappears if the compost is not
produced on site or nearby.

Yet growing the food is the least of it: only a fifth of the total
energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent
processing the food and moving it around. At least in terms of the fuel
burned to get it from the farm to my table, there's little reason to
think my Cascadian Farm TV dinner or Earthbound Farm spring mix salad is
any more sustainable than a conventional TV dinner or salad would have
been.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan

pg. 266 - 269

The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that
food's food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench
into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is
beef and salmon salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question
of cost, for if quality matters so much more than quantity, then the
price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients
in it. If units of omega-3s and beta carotene and vitamin E are what an
egg shopper is really after, then Joel's $2.20 a dozen pastured eggs
actually represent a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial
eggs at the supermarket. As long as one egg looks pretty much like
another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution
of quantity for quality will go on unnoticed by most consumers, but it
is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope
or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.
---

Just sayin' :O)
--
- Billy

E pluribus unum
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96993722