Dear Plantlovers,
today, I would like to introduce you to a little growing experiment I am running this year (aside from the community plantbreeding@home-project): The Milpa! "Milpa" is the name for a very old mixed-crop-growing system, originating from Central-America. The system is based on three different plant genera: Corn (Zea mays), Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) and Squash (Cucurbita pepo). They form such a formidable combination, that they are often referred to as "The Three Sisters", as they grow very harmonically. Every "Sister" has her purpose: the corn acts as trellis for the beans, which help accumulate nitrogen through bacteria they live in symbiosis with. The squash, with its big leafs covers the ground under it, minimizing the evaporation of water from the soil. A genius system! But it does not stop there: Come harvest time, they provide a very balanced and nutricious combination, with corn as a solid source for carbohydrates, beans as supreme protein source and squash as source for many vitamins and micro-nutrients. When I read about the Milpa, I was immediately intrigued and decided to try it myself!
As I know that there are many curious plant-people and hobby scientists here on steemit, I decided to share this experiment with you. Maybe somebody else is as intrigued as I am and will try the same? :)
I decided to grow the corn already indoors to give it a head start before I sow the beans. If you ever want to watch a plant grow extremely fast, corn is for you! Just look at this:
4 days after sowing
5 days after sowing
6 days after sowing
It feels like the plants explode out of their seed, truly awesome!
Here are some pictures of the preparationsof the little plot where everything will be grown and the first plantings:
A new beginning
Return of the spade
The Milpa strikes back
If have marked the different plants with circles to make it easier to spot them, corn is white and squash is marked in red. Here is a closeup of the seedlings:
Corn with some leftover weeds
Squash seedling
I decided to grow sweet corn (the one you can use to grill at a barbeque with molten butter... Mhmmm), all sorts of beans (Kidney beans, green beans, even purple beans), and some special squash, we call it "spaghetti squash": If you cook it for a while, the flesh of the squash will disintegrate into spaghetti like fibers. This is very usable in all kinds of dishes, and this variety has a nice carrot-potato-squash taste, not to sweet, just perfect!
I hope you enjoy watch me grow my Milpa, and I would be glad if you follow along! As the rest of the project is mainly pictures and updates of the growth of the system and thus not very science related, I will not post the growing updates under the SteemSTEM-tag. If you enjoy the project, just follow me to make sure you catch all the updates! :)
Let's grow together!
Dysprosium
