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When I see pumpkins and Indian corn, I’m reminded to be thankful for vegetables developed by ancient Native Americans. Our gardens wouldn’t amount to much without tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squash, pumpkins, corn and beans. So I’m grateful to the pre-Mayans and Aztec people, who developed the tomato. Almost all our cultivated vegetables are vast improvements over the wild plants from which they came. Prehistoric indigenous people did most of the significant improvement.
Wild potato species with small, bitter tubers occur from the southern U.S. to Chile. These were first used in Peru and Bolivia, probably when other food supplies were scarce and survival required experimentation. Potatoes were selected for taste and size and became a staple of the Inca diet.
Broad generalizations about Native American food, agriculture and culture are impossible. This shouldn’t be surprising, since we are talking about many independent nations, living in many different ecosystems. Some groups became highly skilled farmers, while others were nomadic and never planted crops.
If I had been born as a pre-European American, I would like to have lived in the Northwest. Life was hard in those days for native peoples, but our local tribes seem to have had it as good as any and better than most. Salmon, shellfish and other seafood were the mainstay of their diet. In addition, they had a wide array of natural plant foods available for gathering.
Most important among their plant foods was camas or quamash. The bulb of this flower was dug, cooked in a pit in the ground, sun-dried and then stored for future use. Each year during camas harvesting, stones were removed from the soil and undersized bulbs were carefully replanted. The right to harvest certain areas was passed down in families. Except dried salmon, no article of food was more widely traded. I grow it for the blue spring flowers.
The principal vegetables cultivated by Native Americans elsewhere were corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, tobacco and gourds. You still can see the remains of sophisticated 700-year-old terracing and water retention structures in the southwest. Some eastern tribes employed an ingenious intercropping system with corn, beans and squash.
An Iroquois legend portrays corn, bean and squash as three loving sisters, who must always live together to be happy. The older sister (corn) grows tall, strong and graceful. The next younger sister (bean) loves to twine about her. The youngest sister (squash) rambles at the feet of the others. That all Indians grew the “three sisters” together is as mistaken as that all Indians lived in teepees. However, many cultures used the combination because it worked for them.
Corn stalks served as stakes for the beans. Bean roots were able to capture atmospheric nitrogen to feed the corn and squash. The squash’s prickly leaves protected the corn from raccoons and also shaded out weeds. This is so clever that gardeners often want to try it today.
Unfortunately, the system is not as workable for us as it was for its originators. If you have grown green beans, you know it’s best to harvest every few days. This means walking carefully among the squash vines, trying not to step on them. When corn is ready to pick, you may need to break the twining beans to pull off the ears.
Think about the difference. Native Americans were growing dried beans and flour corn. They could just leave the “three sisters” alone until the end of the growing season, then harvest them all at once. A modified version I recommend uses popcorn or Jerusalem artichokes and scarlet runner beans with a pumpkin patch on one side. Popcorn was one of the earliest kinds of corn cultivated. Jerusalem artichokes also are native; they produce little “sunflowers” in late summer; and the tubers are fun to dig in the fall.
Speaking of tubers, last year I grew a potato named Ozette. This variety is claimed to have been in the Northwest before European Americans. Most of the tubers were twice as long as wide and a bit lumpy, but they were delicious.
I grew and enjoyed another novel vegetable this year. ‘Indian Summer’ sweet corn looks like Indian corn with colored kernels. Unfortunately, the colored kernels don’t look as attractive when the ear is cooked. I doubt this new hybrid will be around long, so try it soon. And then give thanks to those ancient gardeners, who made so many of our vegetables possible.
Hortsense: Managing plant problems with Integrated Pest Management
