 Hey everyone, it's Matt, the Stonedabe Farmer, coming at you from Farm For All, and today I want to talk to you about this checkerboard three sisters bed and all of the features that I designed into it. Let's do it. So the other day I featured this checkerboard bed in my video on gardening without irrigation, and it's getting to be pretty late in the season now. I've been planning on putting a second one of these beds in, and I need to do it now if there's any chance of maturing a crop at all. I've been getting it in really soon, I might miss my window, but I'm going to do it, and I want to bring you guys along when I do it so you can see how the prep is done, but first I want to go over some of the design features that I built into this bed. First of all, I didn't want to irrigate, and well, it's not that I didn't want to irrigate, although I don't, but even if I did, we don't have a functioning well at the moment, so irrigation is not an option. One of the things that I did was build these shallow depressions that catches the rainwater and directs it to the plant's roots. That is one of the major features of the design, and I go over it and all of the major water saving features in that other video, link in the description if you want to learn more about that. Today I'm going to focus on some of the other features. The other major feature of this bed is that I wanted it, along with a dozen chickens, to produce enough calories to feed a person for a year. According to my back of the envelope math, this bed will do that. What I did was pull the yields per plant as best as I could scrounge them from seed catalogs and reviews of the varieties that I'm growing, and then use data from the USDA to calculate how many calories it would produce. Now, granted, that is generally assuming an ideal yield from all the reviews and the information in the seed catalogs. I'm not going to get that my first year. For example, I only got 75% germination slash survival on the corn that I planted. So I'm already taking a 25% hit right there. The other thing is that I don't have compost. This is heavy clay that hasn't been amended a lot. The plants are going to struggle in this, so I'm not going to reach my goal this year, but I want to see how close this bed gets. So what I did was find all of the yields that were expected for these varieties, multiply that by the number of plants that I'm growing in this bed, then multiply that figure by the calorie values that I got from the USDA. What I came up with, assuming that winter squash are 80% flesh and 20% seeds, is that the winter squash flesh plus the seeds plus the corn plus the beans plus the eggs from a dozen chickens all comes up to about 730,000 calories, which is equal to 2,000 calories a day. And based on a standard 2,000 calorie a day diet, that'll feed a person for a year. It won't be all of your nutrition, you should still be eating greens and other vegetables on top of what is growing in this bed, but it'll technically grow enough calories to keep you alive if you get a perfect yield, or at least an ideal yield, not a perfect yield, an ideal yield based on what other people are harvesting from these varieties. The size of this bed was another important feature. I wanted to maintain a relatively small footprint while still providing enough space that I could grow plants without irrigation, and I wanted to accommodate enough corn plants that I could save seed without triggering inbreeding depression. If you're not aware, inbreeding depression is a common feature of out crossing plants, and basically it's if you buy a named variety of a plant, so you buy, in this case I'm growing Cascade Ruby Gold corn, if you buy Cascade Ruby Gold corn, those seeds don't all have the same genetics, they have a variety of genetics, they're all similar enough that when you grow it, you're going to get basically the same thing, but what's under the hood is quite varied. Inbreeding depression is a feature of out crossing plants that when the genetics get too limited, the plants lose their vigor. They're trying to self destruct, they're trying to commit suicide because they don't want to pass on their limited genetics to future generations and limit that plant's capacity to survive in an unknown environment. Different plants will have a different number of plants that you need to save seeds from in order to prevent inbreeding depression. Sometimes it's a couple of dozen, sometimes it's 20, 30. Corn is one of the worst ones for inbreeding depression. You need to save seeds from a minimum of 100 or 200 plants, minimum, more is always better. The way I set up this bed, it has just over 200 plants in it, so it's perfect for saving seeds from. It also happens to be the fact that most seed suppliers sell their corn in packets of roughly half an ounce and half an ounce also works out to roughly 200 seeds, so this bed not only allows you to grow enough plants to save your own seed, but also accommodates exactly a packet of seed. Of course, you won't get 100% germination, but that's a later discussion. The size that I ended up figuring out would provide all of these features was a 22 and a half by 22 and a half foot bed. That comes out to just a little over 500 square feet. It accommodates all the corn plants at the right spacing, it accommodates all of the squash at the right spacing, and you don't have to irrigate it. It was the best of all worlds. Of course, this bed features all of the standard features of a three sisters bed. If you don't know what a three sisters bed is, it's a traditional Native American planting technique where you plant corn, beans, and squash together. The corn acts as a trellis for the beans, so the beans can get up to the light. The beans, they form a symbiotic relationship with the rhizobium bacteria in the soil, and it allows them to pull their nitrogen from the air rather than from the soil, and it supplies that nitrogen to other plants in that soil, which also means that it does not compete with the corn for nitrogen that you fertilize with. And the squash in the three sisters bed acts as a living mulch. It covers the base of the bed, it prevents weeds from coming up, and it shades the bed so that you're preventing excess evaporation of soil moisture. Those are all the main features that I built into this bed. There is one that I left out in my gardening without irrigation video the other day, which is that I installed a miniature soil, basically a trench at the top of this bed since it is on a slope. That trench kind of catches any water that's flowing down the hill and slows it down so it will sink in deeply underneath this bed and provide extra water. But those are all the main features. Let's get on to how you actually prepare this thing. That was the workout. I'm going to go in and have some lunch, but before I do, I'm going to show you guys what I did here with the groupeau. So you can see that this isn't really fine. This is still really, really rough, bunch of really big dirt clods. This first pass was really just to create a nice rough dust mulch on top of this. And to get the weeds broken down, I'll let this rest overnight, and then I'll come back through in the other direction. Do one more pass. It'll break up the bigger clods. There's a really fine seed bed. And then I'll be able to start shaping this bed for the next three sisters patch. I had to go take a quick break and put some mulch skin on my hands. My hands are really starting to protest all of this digging, even though I've been doing this all season. And even though I have calluses on my hands at this point, I can still get blisters if I push it too hard. So take care of your hands. Make sure that they're covered. Wear good gloves. Use some mulch skin if you need a little extra layer of protection, and take a break if you're doing just too much of it. The first bed that I did took me six or seven days to complete, so don't think you can just rush through this and get one of these in in a day or two, especially if you're digging in this heavy clay. If you've got some nice lumb, yeah, sure, you can probably bring it on a day, but take your time and don't be too hard on your body. Let's get back to this. Second pass is done, and I don't know how I'm editing this so that it's not just a 30-minute video of me digging, but I hope you guys could tell how much less time and effort that second pass took than the first pass did yesterday. Just doing that first pass and letting it settle overnight softens up the soil a lot. And I'll show you here in a second what it looks like now, but you can see how much finer and looser and fluffier the soil is than it was when I showed it to you yesterday. Just wanted to come and show you guys quickly what the soil looks like now that I've done my second pass. I'm sure you can tell that it is much finer than it was yesterday. There's still some big pieces, like this right here. That's fine. We're going to end up raking a lot of this out when we're shaping the bed, and you actually want some of the bigger pieces along the edges to help hold it shape. So this is the perfect texture right here. Be lots of loose stuff to shape the beds with, and then some larger pieces to give it structure around the edges. Let's go ahead and move on to that next step now. All right, for the next part of prepping the Three Sisters Bed, here are the tools I use. This is just a sheet of cardboard, two and a half feet square that I use as a template for marking out the little pockets. Just a regular garden hoe if you have a bow rake that's narrow enough to rake out the sections that would probably work at least as well if not better. I don't have one that will work for that, and this is a folk and hoe which I like to use to trace around the cardboard. It's not a super useful tool for using in heavy clay, but for marking furrows and tracing things it works pretty well. Definitely not something that's necessary. Not a tool I would necessarily recommend if you're in heavy clay soil, but I have it and it's either that or I can go find a stick. I don't have a long stick handy, so that's what I'm going to use. I won't really be able to film this part in a way where you can really see what I'm doing, but I'll see if I can do it one-handed, do one little example and show you how it works while I film. So, take my folk and hoe, use a stick, use whatever you have handy, use a regular hoe if you're good with it, and just mark out the edge of the beds, the edge of this little pocket so I can see where I need to shape it. And it doesn't have to be super exact, just to make sure you can see it when you move the cardboard, and here's the cardboard here, you can still see it in the video, but I can see it just fine and you'll notice that I ran string around two edges of the bed, I squared it off. If you don't know how to square off your beds, you want to mark four feet on one length of your string, on the other edge mark three feet, and you want them to be, you want the hypotenuse to be five feet. So you can use like a measuring tape or another five foot piece of string, just pull your outside edges out just so that a string or measuring tape going from the four feet marking on one side to the three foot marking on one side is exactly five feet, and that'll square up your corners. I only do two sides of my bed, because in my experience when you're using the template, it's not going to end up being exact, you're going to go a little bit over your edges. So I only do the two, and I use that to line up my template, and then I just use the beds that I've already created, or the little pockets that I've already created to know where to put the template and to move along the bed. I'll see if I can get part of this raked out so you can kind of see how I do it, but I'm not really going to be able to show you the whole process, and at this point I'm sure you're sick of watching me dig anyway, so I'm not going to bother. Basically, let's take from towards the middle, and these outside pockets are always going to be the worst, at least for me, because I never dig quite deep enough along the edges, because I don't want to hit my string. You can probably see even here it's a lot better than it is over here, so I might have to go with this, go at this with the hole a little bit more just to break it up, but once I get it down there'll be a nice little pocket here that I can plant my corn in. Alright, I'm going to get that done, and then I'll be back. Okay guys, I'm wrapping up this first row here. As you might notice, I only have eight squares instead of the nine that I'm supposed to have, and that's the end of my string, and that's the template hanging off the end. Like I said, when you're working with a template like this and dirt like this, it's very unlikely you're going to get it exact the first time. In a situation like this, you can do one of two things, you can either just extend the bed, it's not going to hurt anything, in fact it'll help a lot to have that little bit of extra room between plants, especially if you're in a climate that's much drier than I am, extra space is going to help. The other thing you can do is just push back these little dividers in between the squares, just a little bit to make a little bit of extra room, and I think that's what I'm going to end up doing with this one so that I don't have to extend this little bit that I've dug out, because this is pretty compacted, I don't want to deal with it. I'm just going to go ahead and lay the template down at the edge of the square, I'm going to have it going kind of up the side a little bit, and then I'll just use my hoe to scoot the dirt back level with the template, and try to make an affirm that I can fit one more little square in. Alright, I scooted it down a little bit, and then my template mostly fits, still hanging off by a few inches, but since that's where the soil is going to be piled up at the edge of the depression, I think that's good enough for me. Now when I go through to do the rest of the rows, I'll be able to use the lines that I've already created in this row as my guides so that they're all even, all the way down, and what I'm going to do is finish up forming this last little depression here, and then I'm going to go through and put some wood chip mulch in every other spot, just as a holding place for the squash. I'll get back to you when I'm done with this thing. And here is the bed after it has been shaped. Now I mentioned that I was doing the wood chips every other spot as I made the rows, and I think that'll be obvious, and if it's not, it would be obvious once you got to the end and realized that you wouldn't be able to get a wheelbarrow through all these little pockets without destroying your work. If you do row by row, you can do it with a wheelbarrow really easily, and that saves you from having to haul wood chips bucket by bucket to each of these little pockets. I still need to fertilize, and I still need to plant, but it's getting late in the day. I don't have much sunlight left, so I'm going to save that for morning, and I'll show you guys what that looks like. All right, it's the next morning. I need to get this thing fertilized, so let me show you what the fertilizer situation is. This is my homemade organic fertilizer. It's from Steve Solomon's complete organic fertilizer recipe. I've got links to his books in the description. Basically, the rooster will shut up. Basically, it's a combination of a few different types of lime, some seed meal, seed meal is actually the bulk of it, because that's where the nitrogen comes from, and we've got some rock dust in there. The main recipe actually calls for kelp meal, but at $80 for a 50-pound bag that just wasn't in my budget this year, and he recommends rock dust as an alternative to that. Now, there are a few other random things that he recommends if you really want to go hardcore. A very, very small amount of borax for the boron that's in there, and a few other odds and ends. Definitely recommend checking out his books if you want to be able to mix up your own organic fertilizer. Yes, we understand, dude. Nobody really cares. This is basically similar to your Dr. Earth or your Job's organic fertilizers that you would pick up in the store. Seriously. Those generally have like a few different bacterial and fungal inoculants in them, which this doesn't have, although you could add them, but this works out to, I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.50 a pound or something like that, and when you buy it in the stores, it's closer to $3 or $4 a pound. So if you can buy everything in bulk and mix up your own, this is way more economical than buying organic fertilizer at the store. I need about 30 courts to do our three sisters bed. He recommends 46 courts per 100 square feet, and our bed is just a little over 500 square feet. How much exactly depends on what type of crop you're growing. The higher end, if you don't mind, the higher end is for your heavy feeding crops like corn and squash. So since that's primarily what we're growing, I'm going to be going with that. He has specific recommendations by crop. He has specific recommendations by crop in his book. So you can go ahead and pick that up if you want something a little more exact than the directions I've given you here. Let's go ahead and measure this out and apply it. And hopefully we'll get a little bit of a break from the rooster. Here's this plastic tub that I like measuring out my fertilizer into just so that when I'm working in any particular spot, I can measure out the exact amount I need and then go ahead and take it out to the garden to apply it. See, we've got 500 square feet here, like I mentioned. Well, it's 506 feet in change. And because I've already covered up every other hole with wood chips, I go ahead and divide the fertilizer by 41, which is the number of planting spaces we have for corn, and then apply it just to the corn, figuring that the squash roots are going to make it into those areas anyway, and they'll be able to get their fertilizer once they get there. One other thing I expect to happen to be... I expect to happen because of that is that the corn will get a little bit of a head start and it'll help get it up above the squash before the squash really takes over this area. Um... So it's 30 quarts for this entire bed and that works out to about a pint and a half per each square. So, literally just measure out your pint, sprinkle it on the hole, grab another little half eyeballing, it's fine. Steve Solomon designed this fertilizer so that you can't really over-apply it. It's a really gentle mix. It's going to really help your veggies out, but it's going to be really hard to overdo it. Um, let me go grab the tool I like to use real quick and I'll show you how I mix this in. Alright, I went and got this tool here. The brand name is a Hound Dog. I think I've seen other brands before. I think they're sold as soil aerators. I like to use it if I need to make something in so that I'm only disturbing a very small amount of space with it. It's basically kind of like a spiral fork and you stick it into the ground and twist and it'll mix stuff in. I'm going to see if I can get a shot of me using it, but I don't have a tripod, so I'll see if I can prop my phone up so that you guys can see what it does. Alright, so what you're going to do is just stick this in the ground and give it a twist because this is heavy clay. It's going to fight you a bit. Although, once you get it started, it usually goes pretty easy. Sometimes I'll give it a little push with my foot just to get the tines in there and get them started. And then I find that rocking it back and forth really helps a lot. You don't need to mix it a whole lot. You just want to mix with the soil so that it'll break down and be available to the plants. Sometimes going a bit of an angle helps. Here's the first one done. You don't really need to get the stuff that's here around the edges. When it rains, that stuff will wash right in. And all I did down here is I pushed some of these larger claws that weren't breaking down towards the edge and left all this really fine stuff in the middle for planting in. And now we just have to do that 40 more times. Let's do it. Just wanted to get a quick shot of the bed now that I've got the fertilizer in it. Not because I need to, but just because I think it looks cool. This contrast between the fertilizer and the wood chips really brings out the namesake of the bed. Checkerboard bed. One quick note is wear a mask when you're applying this stuff. It's not toxic, but it is a very, very finely ground rock, basically. So you don't wanna be breathing that stuff in and it'll be hell on your lungs. Same goes when you're applying the wood chips. They aren't finely ground, but they do tend to be a breeding ground for fungus and if your pile isn't extremely wet, it'll kick up a bunch of spores. And trust me, I've spread wood chips once without a mask and I definitely regret it the next day. Don't make the same mistake. A quick note on other amendments. I don't have compost this year just because it's my first year growing in this large of a space and I can't produce that much yet. If you have compost or if you can buy in compost, I would go ahead and put a quarter to half an inch in each of the holes. I'd apply it to the corn depressions as I'm adding the fertilizer and I would throw some in before I put wood chips down for the squash. Another thing that I use quite a lot is nettle tea. You can find lots of videos on that. I might do one in the future, but I usually apply that as a foliar spray. As things get growing, sometimes when I first plant things, I'll do a soil drench with it real quick. That helps compact the soil around the seeds and make sure that the roots can get into the soil really well. And those are the main things that I use and if you have them available, I would definitely add some of those on top of just the fertilizer. And if you can't get the fertilizer, I would definitely use some compost at the very least. That is prepped and it's time to plant the seeds. And one thing that I like to do if I'm planting either at a time of year when the soil is too cold for the seeds to germinate, or if I'm planting when there's not gonna be any rain in the forecast and there might not be enough soil moisture for the seeds to germinate, is to go ahead and pre-germinate those seeds. There are a few different methods that you can use. You can use a sprouting jar like you would use if you were growing sprouts to eat. The method that I went ahead and used this time and one of my favorite methods is to just roll up your seeds in a moist paper towel, stick them in a plastic container or a plastic bag with the top cracked so that the air can exchange and then just check them every day for the roots to emerge. Let me show you an example of what that looks like. Here's an example of what the seeds will look like after they germinate when you're pre-germinating them. This seed right here is what it should look like. The root should just barely be peaking out of the seed. That way it won't be long and fragile. There's no risk of you breaking it. I underestimate how much time it's gonna take me to get this bed prepared and I ended up with a bunch of seeds like this. You don't want this. This root is way too long. The risk of breaking it is really high. In fact, this one you probably can't tell but it broke off and it may survive but there's a very good chance that this seed will die now that the root is damaged. I'm gonna go ahead and stick it in the ground and see what happens. But definitely aim for this guy right here. Should pop out within maybe two or three days and that'll be the perfect time to plant it. Now in each of these squares you're going to want to plant five seeds. One in each corner and one in the very center. What I like to do when I come out to the garden is to keep my seeds wrapped in a moist paper towel and then just open it up as I pull out each side, each seed to plant. In this case because I've got around 200 seeds here I went ahead and kept them in a plastic container just to help hold some moisture in because the paper towel would dry out before I'd be able to plant it all. And what you want to do, I just use a trusty little screwdriver here. I kind of clear some of the looser stuff around the top out of the way and then I drive it in, give it a little purl, pull it out without, hopefully without dropping any soil down in there and filling my hole back up. Take your seed, drop it in, try to get it root down. Just so that the root's going the right way from the start. Fill it back in and that is it. Do it four more times, again, once in each corner. So I already got the one in the center and then move on to the next square. Okay, next I'm gonna show you how to do the squash seeds. It's more or less the same process but there'll be one difference because we've got the wood mulch here. One point that I want to make real quick before I do the squash seed and so if you do end up with any of those seeds that get away from you and have the really long root, you can still plant them. They'll probably make it. You just gotta be very, very gentle with it. Make sure you make a nice big hole with lots of loose dirt and get it in really gently. Try to make sure its root is facing down and if there's a sprout starting to form like there is on some of my corn seeds, make sure that's pointed up and just be very gentle with it and hope for the best because that's all you can really do once they get that ahead of you. Okay, squash. Because we have the wood mulch here and one of the points of the wood mulch is that it is a weed suppression. Well, you don't want to suppress your own seeds from sprouting. So what you gotta do is pull back some of this mulch from the center to make a spot to plant the seed. You see that? Just like that. Pull the mulch back, get back down to the soil. And there it's basically the same as it was for the corn. Pull one of my squash seeds out of my container here. Squash seed. You can see the root tip coming out right there. That's a good size. You can get it at that length, watch them every day, try to make sure your bed's ready so you can get them in when they're at this length. And that'll be perfect. And you're gonna do screwdriver again. Just make a hole. And the nice thing about the squash squares is that this mulch is going to hold a lot of moisture in. I don't know if you can tell quite how moist this soil is. Hey, it's a lot easier to get the soil to stay where you want it. And it's a lot easier to ensure that the seed has enough moisture to actually sprout. Go ahead and drop that down in the hole I made, cover it up loosely, and that's it. Don't pull the mulch back over, leave it open in the center just like this. And once the seed sprouts and you've got a nice little plant going, then you can pull the mulch back in around the plant to hold the moisture in and keep the weeds out. There are a couple of points that I need to hit on while we're on the subject of planting seeds. Typically in a three sister's bed like this, you would not plant your corn, beans, and squash all at the same time. You would plant your corn first, and then you would wait until the corn reaches about a foot high and then come through and plant your beans and squash. The reason being that if you planted all three at the same time, the corn would not be tall enough by the time the beans and the squash really took off, and it would end up getting either shaded out or completely pushed over by the larger squash and bean plants. So typically I've found that the corn will go in and then it'll take it, in our climate it'll take three to four weeks for the corn to be tall enough and then you can finally put in your squash and beans. Now I did make a point earlier that I'm only putting fertilizer in the corn spots in the hopes that it'll give corn a little extra boost and the squash will catch up to it later. That's going to be especially important on this bed because I am running really late in the season and I really need to get a second bed planted. So I'm going to end up putting in squash and corn at the same time as you just saw. I'm hoping it works out, but it's not a guarantee. Given the choice, I would always plant the corn first and then wait to plant the beans and the squash. The other thing that I need to point out is that I have set up this bed so that around the outside, all of the squares on the outside that contain squash actually contain summer squash. I'm planting early prolific yellow squash, but any kind of summer squash like your zucchinis or your patty pans, that's what I'm planting around the outside just because I'm going to be planting them anyway. I don't want to dedicate a row in my main garden to them and planting them around the outside means that the plants will still be accessible when this bed is fully mature. Also, I have been planting my summer squash at the same time as the corn because summer squashes are bush varieties, not vining varieties. So it won't really be a case that these squash are going to sprawl everywhere and overtake the corn. Another thing I need to mention, and it's a bit of a sticking point, most seed catalogs don't mention whether their winter squash varieties are climbing or trailing. And that is very, very important when you're doing a bed like this. You need a trailing squash and the only way to figure out what you have is probably to experiment or ask people who have already grown that variety. The reason you need a trailing squash and not a climbing squash is because if you choose a climbing variety, it is going to climb up your corn and it is going to pull your corn over and then you will not get corn. If you can find a seed catalog that tells you whether the squash is climbing or trailing, that's perfect. Most of them do not ask around, do your research or just be prepared to fix the facts that your squash might decimate your corn. One last thing is about the corn varieties that you grow. A Three Sisters bed is about growing staple crops. The whole point of this bed is to grow enough calories to feed a person for a year. What you need is either a flour corn or a flint corn. This isn't the place to plant your sweet corn because you will not be able to access this bed to harvest it. The point is to let this bed go to maturity when the corn dries, when the squash matures, when the beans dry, then you go through and harvest all of it. The reason that I'm recommending a flour corn or a flint corn and not a dent corn comes from legendary plant breeder, Carol Deppie. If you read her book, The Resilient Gardener, which I have a link to down in the description, she gives a brilliant write-up about the differences between those three types of corn. A flour corn and a flint corn have two very different types of starches. One of them cooks under dry cooking conditions like baking. The other cooks under moist cooking conditions like boiling. They are polar opposites. A dent corn becomes a dent corn because it is a cross of a flour corn and a flint corn and has 50, 50 one starch and the other. That corn will not cook properly because it's going to need to be boiled and baked in order to cook all of the way through. Like I said, Carol has great write-up. She makes a point about how the way most people are instructed to make things like polenta and grits and things like that. Encourage people to boil their dish and then bake it. And it's because most people are using dent corns. It's a very long process. It takes like 40 plus minutes to make a dish of polenta, doing it with a dent corn. If you select a corn that is meant to be boiled and only boiled, then it's a 10 minute process tops. So choose a flour corn, choose a flint corn, do not choose a dent corn, do not plant sweet corn in your three sisters bed. One last thing, which I forgot. One last thing about flint and flour corns. Now, typically flint corns are a Southern adapted variety and they'll get eight plus feet tall. Flour corn varieties were grown by Northern tribes and they were adapted to Northern climates and they typically only get four to five feet tall. Why is that important? Well, the whole point of a three sisters bed is that the corn acts as a trellis for the beans. If you're growing a corn that only gets four to five feet tall, it is not going to act as a trellis for a bean that wants to climb eight to 10 feet. Alternatively, if you're growing a flint corn that gets eight to 10 feet tall, you're wasting a ton of space by growing a half runner type of bean that will only get four or five feet tall. Choose your corn and beans to match each other is the point that I'm trying to make here. And further, what I like to do is choose a good dual purpose bean. What I mean by that is a bean that is excellent as a green bean, but will also make a really, really excellent dry bean. That way you aren't growing multiple varieties of beans. You have one bean planted throughout your whole bed and you can pick green beans from around the outside of the bed. And then when the season's over and all of the beans dry, you can go through and harvest all of the dry beans for use as dry beans. The one that I've settled on for that purpose is Kentucky Wonder. Honestly, the first year that I grew it as a dry bean, it was completely by accident. I planted way more plants than I could harvest green beans from. I got sick of picking them. I let them go at the end of the season. I went through and picked all the dry beans to save seeds for the next season. And I had way more than I needed in order to plant for the next season. So I ended up cooking up the rest. They were the best bean I have ever tasted. It's the best argument I've ever seen for growing your own beans. Most people say, don't bother growing dry beans. Beans are cheap. Cheap beans taste cheap. Grow your own beans. They're way better. Grow a good, dull purpose bean so that you can get green beans and dry beans and choose your corn and beans to match. Choose a flint corn and a regular pole bean if you want tall varieties and you have a climate that will support tall varieties. Choose a flower corn and a half runner bean if you need short varieties for a short or cooler season. Since I won't be planting beans in my new bed today, I want to come over and show you how they're developing in my first bed. So like I said, when the corn reaches about a foot high, then go ahead and come on through and plant your beans. I haven't decided yet on an exact number that is appropriate for this kind of planting, for this bed setup. This year I went ahead and planted four beans per corn stalks. You can kind of see four beans popping up there. And we'll go ahead and give four beans a try this year and see how it goes, but plant somewhere between two and four beans per corn stalk. Now, if you aren't saving your own seeds, that is going to be difficult because this bed will have just over 200 corn plants in it. And that means you would need 800 beans if you're doing four per. You can get away with 400 beans if you're only doing two per plant, but in either case it means you're either going to have to buy your seeds in bulk, which is sometimes an option, depending on who you're buying your seeds from. The alternative is the season before you plan to put this bed in, save seeds from all of your beans. I think I planted just over 600 beans in this bed and that was from saving about a pound of beans give or take from my previous crop. And that's only because as you're going to find out, if you plant exactly one packet of corn, that will fill this bed, but you will not get 100% germination. I got about 75% germination. So if I'd gotten 100% and I planted four beans per plant, that would have been 800 plants. I only ended up with a 75% germination and ended up planting 600 beans for around each stalk. The bed is planted now and that is it for this video. I just wanted to mention a few last things about the bed and then some housekeeping stuff and then our time together will be over. I did mention that you want to be planting a flower or a flint corn in this bed, not a sweet corn, but I did not mention that you can pick your flower and flint corns, immature and use it just like you would a sweet corn. What you want to do is pick it in the milk stage just like you would if you were picking sweet corn. While it's still green and if you puncture one of the kernels, some kind of milky fluid will come out. It's the perfect time to pick it, then you can roast it up and eat it just like you would a sweet corn. It won't be as sweet as a sweet corn, but it'll still be delicious. It'll probably have a lot better and more complex flavor than what you're used to getting in a sweet corn, which is just kind of sweet and doesn't have a lot of other flavors going on. One other thing I want to mention is about climate. In my climate, it's warm, humid and dry during the summer, but it rains the rest of the year, so this bed helps store water underneath it for when we go through our drought season. If you are in a climate where it's hot and dry pretty much year-round, you might need more spacing than this bed allows. The Hopi Native Americans from kind of the Arizona, New Mexico, parts of California, they typically plant other corn six to seven feet apart in clumps. So with this design, you might need to either make the squares more like five or six feet rather than two and a half feet, or you might need to add a little bit of irrigation just to supplement whatever rainfall you do end up getting, but that's something you're just gonna kind of have to experiment with and figure out what works in your climate. If you have to irrigate, it's not that big of a deal. The way this bed is set up, you're going to have to irrigate less than you would. If you didn't set it up this way, so that's still a win, even if it's not 100% without irrigation in your climate. The other thing is if you live in a climate where you get monsoon rains during the summer, which I discovered is the case for parts of the US Southwest, which I did not realize when I started buying corn varieties that were native to there. You might not want the depressions because it might capture too much water and cause root rot, but again, that's something you're gonna have to experiment with in your climate and figure out. You might just dig one little depression for one season and stick a few seeds in there and see if they end up being able to survive with that amount of irrigation, or if it's too much or too little, or just kind of figure out what works in your climate. But that's all I can really think about as far as the actual bed goes. If you guys have any questions, throw them down below and I'll happily respond to anything you guys want to know about this thing. Everything else is kind of housekeeping stuff. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone that watched all the way through. I know this was a long one. And thank you to everyone that subscribed after my last video. I was not expecting that money for being my first video. It's still a long shot from being at the top. By YouTube standards, but it means a lot to me that that many of you guys are on board for the kind of stuff that I'm doing out here. I know that the audio isn't that great. We don't have enough solar for me to run my computer, so I'm having to film and edit this 100% on my phone. Unfortunately, I don't have an external mic and can't afford one. So that's kind of just how it is for right now. So I appreciate you guys sticking through it in spite of all the audio issues and whatever video issues there are. I was able to bum a tripod off of a friend halfway through filming this. So hopefully the quality of the shots improves slightly over the next few videos. And I'm certainly getting a lot more comfortable talking to no one. So hopefully it's a little less awkward from here on out. Oh, links. I do have, one of the other things that's a problem with doing this all on my phone is that YouTube does not allow you to, A, add subtitles, which I would like to do because my mother's deaf and won't be able to watch any of my videos. And the other thing you cannot do from mobile is add links to other videos within your video. So I've got links below to my last video on gardening without irrigation, which I mentioned earlier in this video. And also, and David the Good's live stream the other day, he took my comment and turned it into his outro song. And I linked to that timestamp in the video because I thought it was hilarious and would love for you guys to go check it out and tell him that the Stone Dave farmer sent you. I also left links in the description to all of the books that I mentioned in this video plus a few of the others that I really recommend. Thanks for checking those out. Thanks for checking the other videos out. Thanks for sticking with me this long. It's been an adventure and I'm glad you guys were here for it. Until next time.