three-sister planting
n.— «Imitating a traditional Iroquois practice called “three-sister planting,” the farm plants corn, beans and squash together. The beans fix nitrogen into the soil that corn depletes while the corn’s stalk enables the bean plant to grow upward. Squash keeps both hydrated.» —“A Farm Grows In Brooklyn” by Gillian M. Kalson The Indypendent (New York City) June 8, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one...
The owner of a Berlin, Maryland, produce stand wants to know: When a customer is buying four ears of corn, should they say I have four corn or I have four ears of corn? Corn is a mass noun that can also be counted as a plural, just as we might say I...