Three Sisters
The three sisters garden refers to a traditional Native American guild for growing staple crops. Consisting of maize, beans, and squash, ancient Mesoamericans first domesticated and cleverly combined the three sisters before spreading it north and south across the Americas.
In a three sisters garden, maize provides a living structure for the beans to climb. The beans, in turn, put nitrogen into the soil that the other plants use. Squash spreads along the ground, keeping the soil moist and blocking weeds from growing.
#Variations
Some communities add a fourth sister, most commonly to attract pollinating insects. West of the Rocky Mountains, Rocky Mountain bee plant serves as this fourth sister; East of the Rockies, amaranth.
#Specialization
#Three Sisters People
When a community focuses on its relationship with the three sisters to make a living, it can shape their lives in a wide variety of ways. A few examples include:
A community that specializes in relationship with the three sisters will invariably tend strongly towards horticulture, and thus live in settled villages for at least part of the year. Given the Fifth World's tropical climate, these communities will tend to practice swidden cultivation, growing different guilds of plants at different stages and moving around the jungle in a regular cycle. The three sisters generally serve as the first guild in the cycle, planted on recently cleared fields.
A settled (or partially settled) community requires a system for determining who holds responsibility for cultivating specific plots of land. The Haudenosaunee, who have practiced three sisters horticulture for generations, traditionally passed plots of land down through matrilineal lines. This helped offset the tendency towards patriarchy that can arise from settled living.
A settled (or partially settled) community also requires a strategy for defending their land from other communities that might try to take it from them. A tradition of scouts helps them keep an eye out for any threats or encroachment on their land and warn away would-be attackers while avoiding out-and-out war.
A community that practices horticulture generally has to come up with a strategy or two to keep animals (like rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons, and deer) from eating the vegetables in their gardens. Such a community may have an alliance with a local coydog pack, feeding them scraps (and sometimes maybe even letting them sleep in their houses) in exchange for their help chasing off grazers.
Some communities may have secret societies inspired by the different sisters. Sisterhoods of maize, beans, squash, and possibly amaranth or Rocky Mountain bee plant cut across villages and clans to unite women from many different communities, thus helping keep the peace. Each society could have a different emphasis based on the plant's role in the guild. For example, the Maize Sisterhood could emphasize leadership, Bean Sisterhood diplomacy, Squash Sisterhood care-giving, and Amaranth Sisterhood relations with the other-than-human world.