The Maize Field Our gardens are planted primarily with maize, beans, and squash; crops that we call "The Three Sisters," because they're compatible like members of a family.  Look closely at the stalks of maize and you'll see that the climbing green beans are placed nearby to use the maize for support.  And planted between the tall mounds of maize and beans are squash plants, with broad leaves which create shade; that cuts down on weeds. We also have some less familiar crops: bright yellow sunflowers, with their edible seeds, and Jerusalem artichokes, with their smaller yellow flowers.  The tasty roots of the Jerusalem artichoke can be eaten raw or boiled, and in front of the Jerusalem artichoke is goosefoot, or chenopodium, a wild plant with tiny edible seeds that ripen later in the season. It's a lot of work to have a garden a half acre or more in size. If we need to clear a new field in the spring, the men and women work together. We girdle the large trees; that is, we cut away a band of bark all the way around the trunk, so that the flow of sap is disrupted and the tree slowly dies. Then we cut down the smaller trees, burn the underbrush, and leave the stumps to rot. You can see some stumps still standing here; we just work around them. Behind the Scenes with Museum Researcher Doug Currie For years archaeologists had read early European descriptions of Native American cornfields, but it was almost luck, and some very clever thinking, when this one was first found, because what does a garden look like archaeologically? Basically, we found a little hill bumping up in the ground. And the different layers of soil didn't go up and then back down, as they would have in nature. Instead, the lower parts of the ground layers continued straight along and then on top of that was this built-up hill of very dark topsoil. So we knew it was not a natural occurrence. And after two years of research and excavation, we found a number of other hills, and we learned a lot from that garden. It was really very small, about an eighth of an acre, a household size garden. It was situated immediately next to a wigwam, just outside the door. The mounds were about one foot tall, separated from one mound to another by three or four feet, and they weren't done in rows. That's because Native people had no reason to clear their fields completely; it was much easier to work around tree stumps and large rocks than it was to remove them. And if you look at the garden in this Pequot village, you'll see all of this information put to use here.