Squash, beans and the milpa
Three crops grown together feed each other and make a complete diet.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 4.7 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Squash is among the earliest American domesticates, from around 8000 BCE in Mexico, with beans following later. Grown together with maize as the milpa or three sisters, the combination is unusually well balanced: beans fix nitrogen the maize needs, maize provides a stalk for beans to climb, squash shades out weeds, and beans supply the lysine maize lacks. It is an agricultural system rather than three separate crops.