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Three sisters method.
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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 |
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