"Stacking Functions" is a Permaculture Design Principle that I have used often in the design of my Food Forest Garden. Stacking Functions basically means you intentionally choose plants that provide multiple benefits in your garden. By choosing these multi-tasking plants, you are helping to create a healthy and resilient ecosystem that functions mostly on it's own and reduces your overall workload in the garden. Lupine is one of those plants as it does so much work for you! Lupine attracts pollinators to your garden in early spring, it fixes nitrogen in the soil to improve soil health and feed its neighbouring plants, it grows abundantly and provides healthy biomass that you can leave to decompose on it's own in fall when the plant dies back, or use it as mulch and chop and drop it in place. The hollow stems of the plants also provide an excellent habitat for our over-wintering insect friends and lupines are gorgeous as cut flowers. Lupines attract aphids away from our food crops such as cabbages and lupines are simply beautiful to look at! Some lupine varieties are even edible as lupines are in the legume family, but please do you research well before eating lupine seeds as some are also highly toxic. Lupines are also deer resistant which means it's a great flower to plant along borders and edges.

In this video I share why I love lupine in my garden and when and how to harvest the seeds to grow more lupine.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:36 When to harvest seeds
1:27 Chop and Drop as Mulch
1:42 Growing Lupine
2:10 Nitrogen Fixing
2:45 Drying Seed Pods
4:22 Lupine Seeds
4:43 Trap Crop
5:01 Summary of benefits

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