Inspirational Three Sisters Mounds Sunshine Experiment with Sunflowers and Community Seed Distribution in Evansville, Indiana

This will be brief and I will go into it at length in the book about the project that I'm going to write.   

Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash) plus sunflowers are nutritious to humans and grow symbiotically.  The display garden in the front yard (Circle #1) served as a way to inspire and familiarize the neighbors with these plants and the idea of growing food in their lawns instead of grass.  Food is getting more expensive and biodiversity is going down, so this project aims to inspire people to take the plunge into farming.  Judging from how my neighbors disappeared about half of the ears of corn, there is interest, at least in eating Jimmy Red Corn.

Managing people was very stressful. Given health constraints, for 2023, I am not going to be doing a display garden for this project.  I am going to do something in the circles.  The idea of doing basic science with it is not tenable because so much of the corn is going missing.

Seed distribution efforts and working with subcontractors was stressful, so that is one reason I am only going to distribute red clover seeds (to be planted where the farmer wants to turn grassy lawn into cultivated land soon).  There was very little interest in signing up for seeds, as underlined by the very little interest in the free seed signup survey that I made.  Due to this low interest and the crop failures with squash and beans in all of the Circles, it would be irresponsible to push the same seeds into the Evansville, IN, area, because I don't want people to try to farm but be discouraged by a crop failure.

I took several data points off of each ear of corn using a survey (data entry tool) that I designed:

But these are probably only the smallest ears, considering that people picking, probably took the largest ears.

For this project, I developed a twine-based measurement system for building the crop circles. I was successful with it (all 3 circles were built to the correct dimensions). I have named it “the Krantz revolution method,” because it involves measurement of where to place soil and mulch by revolving the endpoint of a piece of twine around a stake in the middle of each of the mounds. The Krantz revolution method relies on geometric facts:

(1) all points on a circle are equidistant to that circle's center;
(2) a line segment that goes between a circle and its center is the radius;
(3) the radius of a circle is half as wide as the widest part (diameter) of a circle;
(4) when a circle is inscribed in a square;

(5) the circle and square have the same center and;
(6) the diameter of the circle equals the length of a side of the square.

Krantz revolution method steps, as developed in the project NCR SARE FNC22-1337:

Materials:
1. Twine (can be thin or thick but NOT stretchy), a twine-cutting tool such as scissors, a measuring tape, stakes, and EITHER a geomagnetic compass with degree measurements (preferred) AND/OR a protractor (functional but more difficult to use).
2. A schematic of the site can be helpful, but is not necessary to the Krantz revolution method.
3. Locate the center of each circle to be measured.
3.1. Depending on the individual project, this step will vary.
3.2. In this project, the three crop circles were each identically laid out.
3.3. Use a protractor or geomagnetic compass to find the centers of the circles.  This part of the method will be extensively built out in the book.
4. Place a stake in the center of each circle.
5. Tie a piece of twine to each stake THEN cut the twine to the length of the radius of the circle to be measured.
6. PLEASE NOTE: After much trial and error, it was discovered that tying the twine to the stake and only then cutting it to size is more accurate, less time-consuming, and wastes less material on mistakes than cutting before tying.
7. Pull the twine tight between the stake and the end of the twine.
8. Revolve the twine around the stake at ground level.
9. The full area underneath the twine as it revolves is where the circle lays.
10. Place material, such as soil or mulch, either underneath the twine (within the circle) or not underneath the twine (outside of the circle).

The development of the Krantz revolution method was inspired by reading about how ancient Egyptians used knotted rope to create a right triangle with sides the lengths of 3, 4, and 5 units for reference. For example, for squaring corners of buildings. The 3-4-5 right triangle is also the basis of the Pythagorean theorem.