The wire fence may be your best bet. Some of the larger cultivars of sweet corn, especially the older open pollinated cultivars will hold pole beans. Stowells Evergreen, Country Gentleman. A few of older large hybrids also will work. Allow extra space and let the corn get a foot to two feet high before planting the beans. Even then they will cut your corn yield.

To get a good bean crop, space the corn to allow plenty of light to penentrate. This past summer I planted a three sisters garden with hills spaced 4 feet apart in both directions with 4 to 6 plants per hill. That, together with the fact I didn't remove tillers (suckers) resulted in a dense growth of corn which didn't allow much light to get down between the corn stalks. My bean yield was next to nothing and the squash crop was zilch. The corn yield was excellent.

I visited another three sisters garden where hills were spaced at 6 feet. It had vigorous bean and squash plants. Unlike my garden, you could see down the space between the rows.

Jim

Thanks for the tips. I grow my corn in a double row up against the fence (both sides get direct sun at some point in the day), so the beans will hopefuly knit everything together and there will be enough light.

For an interesting read you can download the pdf of Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians from google books. They spaced corn hills 4ft apart and centered smaller bean hills within each set of four corn hills. The squash were in thier own sections of the fields, which separated large plots of corn/beans. They didn't have the squash vines running in amongst the corn. It was pretty intensive/efficient use of space and sunlight.

I'm not sure where the idea to grow all three sisters together came from, maybe the woodland tribes did it that way, but it seems like the corn would definitely shade the squash if done that way.

I always figured that they planted the squash, mainly, on the outside edge of the garden. Though, when we lived in Mexico, we did observe some Native American fields with all three interplanted. They did rows of corn with beans planted on one out of every so many corn plants and squash planted, in the row of corn, every so often. Often, the plantings were somewhat sparse by my standards. But it worked.

George
Tahlequah, OK