Happy Fall!! The Fall officially arrived last week and the market is filling up with butternut squash, sweet potatoes, and greens.

I would like to send a HUGE thank you out to all of our wonderful customers for helping us gather items to send to the NC Diaper Bank as they support families that were affected by Hurricane Florence. The outpouring of donations, love, and interest in helping was absolutely amazing!  

We have a lot of wonderful activities planned for our Fall Saturday markets and we hope you will be able to join us! The Art of Cool Festival will be hosting Soul Yoga this weekend, September 29. Yoga starts at 9:30 am, don't forget your mat and water bottle!

The Durham Farmers' Market will also be hosting a Silent Auction on November 10 from 8 am - noon. The Silent Auction will help support our Wednesday Sprouts Kid's Club during the summer as well as our Double Bucks program at market. All gifts will be local, so come support the market and get a little early holiday shopping done!

Missives from a Market Farmer: The Three Sisters 

Missives is a series of short articles by Judy Lessler, a DFM farmer, on the history, cultivation, and preparation of the items sold at market.

 

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the iconic trio of mutually beneficial companion plants known as the Three Sisters (maize [corn], beans, and winter squash or pumpkin). For centuries, this was the staple food of Native Americans. The corn stalk supports the twining, climbing beans; the beans fix nitrogen for all three crops; and the large-leafed vines of the squash plant shade out weeds.

The Three Sisters were first grown in Mesoamerica and spread throughout Northern America. By the time the French were exploring the area around the St. Lawrence River, the Three-Sisters had been adopted by the Iroquois Nation (a confederacy of four to five Indian tribes) as their main form of agriculture. It was described as, "an immensely productive agriculture based on maize, bean, and squash in use from Florida to Ontario."

The technique of companion planting of these three crops was developed over some 5000 years. It provides significant nutritional benefits when compared to growing the three crops separately and is highly sustainable. The three crops are grown on a mound of soil with corn in the center, surrounded by interspersed bean and squash plants. It is a highly sustainable cultivation method because the ground is not tilled, thereby, preventing erosion and the depletion of soil nutrients inherent in tilling systems. In addition, beans fix nitrogen which provides nutrients to all three plants. 

Squash has been cultivated in the New World for 8000 to 10,000 years and is thought to be one of the first, if not the first, domesticated plant. "Why didn't anybody tell me this," you may be asking.

My answer is that I do not know. For some reason, even though we live in North America, we identify with our European ancestors because we use their languages and read their histories. Thus, we think of the beginnings of agriculture in terms of the domestication of animals and cultivation of wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent followed by their spread to Europe. We are ignorant of our native land.

Tribalism runs long and runs deep. 

Maize was domesticated around a 1000 years after squash and beans were even later. By about 3500 years ago, all three crops were being grown in the same local area, but definitive evidence of the Three Sisters being co-planted can only be traced to about 1300 AD-some 800 years ago. However, after it was worked-out his companion planting method spread quickly.  

As I researched the Three-Sisters, I continually searched for information on recipes. Written indigenous languages were in their infancy at the time of the European invasion, and there was very little trade across large areas in "beer and barley", or any other major commodities. Trade was what spurred the development of written language in the ancient Fertile Crescent.  Thus, the pressing need to develop a written language was just arising in the colonial period and there appear to be no written recipes for the Three-Sisters. 

I found recipes for "Iroquois" soups and stews, but I suspected these are very modern. I have since become more convinced of this because of a study from 2016 which looked at the nutritional value of the Three-Sisters. It turns out that it is highly unlikely that they were eaten fresh. Rather, they were most likely harvested as mature pumpkins or squash, dried beans, and dried corn.

Per gram, dried beans and corn have some 100 times more energy and 30 times more protein than in the fresh form which is full water. In addition, the mature seeds of winter squash and pumpkins are a concentrated source of nutrition and were likely roasted and eaten. Finally, there is no indication that the indigenous peoples of the new world suffered from pellagra, which is due to a niacin deficiency in grain and legume based diets. This is because the natives, particularly in North America, processed dried corn using a nixtamalization process in which the dried kernels are boiled with lime (calcium hydroxide) or lye from wood ash. This produces niacin and causes calcium to bond with the starches in the corn giving it  2 to 4 times more calcium than maize prepared without nixtamalization.  

Thus, the following recipe for a bean and pumpkin burrito is probably closer to what an Iroquois native would have eaten than a stew or soup is-excepting the sour cream and cheese topping.

THREE SISTERS BURRITOS

Six servings

 

1 tablespoon oil

1 onion (chopped)

2 cloves garlic (chopped)

2 tablespoons chili powder

2 teaspoons cumin (ground)

1 (15 ounce) can black beans, drained and rinsed (or 1 1/2 cups cooked beans, from 1/2 cup dry)

1/2 cup water

1 teaspoon oregano

Salt and pepper to taste

1 cup  pumpkin puree

1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce (chopped)

2 tablespoons cilantro (chopped)

6 large CORN tortillas. If not available use 12 small corn tortillas.

 

Heat the oil in a pan. Add the onion and sauté until tender, about 3-5 minutes. Add garlic and sauté until fragrant, about 30 seconds to 1 minute. Add the chili powder, and cumin and sauté for about a minute. Then add the beans, water, oregano, salt and pepper and cook until most water has evaporated. Remove the beans from the heat and mash half of them with a fork. Mix in the pumpkin puree, chipotle peppers and cilantro and warm. Place some of the pumpkin mixture and some of the bean mixture and into a tortilla and wrap it. Top with salsa, shredded cheese, sour cream, and so on.

Adapted from  https://www.closetcooking.com/pumpkin-and-black-bean-burritos/