Hominy was added to soups and stews along with dried meat, prairie turnips and other garden produce. Beans were grown in hills, sometimes intercropped with the corn and sometimes not. There were many different varieties of beans with varying colors and patterns, sizes, and tastes. Fort Totten beans were planted in the Gibbs Museum Dakotah Garden in 1998 and grew very well. The squash grown in the Upper Midwest is considered a pumpkin and it can also be a gourd .
Terminology is very confusing.
Although the squash grown here was of the same species as the orange Jack O'Lantern , they were probably round, smooth, and green with white stripes. A favorite soup was made with the very young squashes. More mature squashes could be sliced and dried for use during the winter. Squash take up a lot of space in a garden, but the yield can be measured in hundreds of pounds. Sunflowers were grown in Native American gardens from the East Coast to the Southwest to the Northern Great Plains.