Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville
Three Sisters Collective Project
The Three Sisters Collective Project is the planting, weeding and harvesting by a diverse group of people with big hearts, of the traditional intercrop of corn, beans and squash, whose seeds we save and replant yearly, in reverence to Mother Earth and to the loving hands that feed humanity.
Each spring for the past 22 years Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville (SAL) has been growing the Three Sisters in crops large enough to nourish our collective and many other people for the year. The Three Sisters intercrop is a practice passed down to us from Native Peoples of Abya Yala, the indigenous name for the Americas used by a group in Panama. We sow save and protect the maize seed used in this crop, which is a natural cross between Hickory King and Bloody Butcher heirloom maize varieties, which is survived droughts even when the modern varieties in adjacent fields all died. We call our open-pollinated Native Ohio Valley corn Rhodelia Triple Rainbow, due to its many colorful grains and the rainbow that appeared over the field of newly sprouted corn one year. Our corn is then processed by our collective throughout the year and shared as corn meal, hominy, masa and even fermented corn porridge atol. The project creates a long standing community of growers who cultivate a strong reverence to the knowledge and wisdom passed down by this culture. SAL has also co-sponsored for several years a late March Corn Festival in partnership with La Casita Center.