Permaculture Plants: Lupine

The beauty of Lupines are not just in their flowers.

http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/potd/lupinus_sp.jpg

Common Name: Lupine

Scientific Name: Lupinus species

Family: Fabaceae (the Legume or Pea family)

Edible Lupine seeds being developed in South America.http://www.mosojcausay.org/in/im/Noticia/feria002.jpg

Description:

Lupines are beautiful wildflowers found almost around the globe. Known primarily for their showy spikes of flowers in blues, purples, reds, yellows, and white, these legumes put nitrogen back into the soil (natural fertilizer), host a number of beneficial insects, can act as a groundcover to protect top soil, and some species even produce edible seeds. A brilliant addition to the home and Forest Garden.

European Yellow Lupine (Lupinus luteus)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Illustration_Lupinus_luteus1.jpg/636px-Illustration_Lupinus_luteus1.jpg

History:

Found almost all over the world, there are likely native or at least naturalized Lupines close to where you live. They have been used as food plants likely for thousands of years. The Romans were fond of the seeds, but have been used by most Mediterranean cultures. The South and North American species were also used by natives there as well. More recently, there has been a growing trend to use Lupines as a cash crop alternative to soy, livestock forage and feed crop, as well as developing a wide variety of ornamental flowering varieties.

Trivia:

• Edible species include Wild or Sundial Lupine (Lupinus perrenis), Seashore Lupine (Lupinus littoralis),  Blue Lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis), another Blue Lupine (Lupinus augustifolius), and White Lupine (Lupinus albus), but the best is likely the Pearl Lupine (Lupinus mutabilis).
• There are larger species in the Lupine genus... the most common large species being the Tree Lupine or Yellow Bush Lupine (Lupinus arboreus) that grows to over 6 feet (2 meters) tall.
• Lupines are an important larval food for many butterflies and moths.

Lupines come in a wide variety of colors.

http://www.mest.kr/imgdata/mest_kr/200912/2009122004037665.jpg

USING THIS PLANT

Primary Uses:

• Ornamental flowering plant (wildflower)
• Edible seeds in some species - used as cooked bean substitute, can be roasted then ground into a powder (NOTE: seeds contain a bitter toxin that can easily be leached out by soaking the seeds in water overnight, and up to 3 days) and discarding the soaking water. 
• Some species produce an edible oil from the pressed seeds

Secondary Uses:

• Nitrogen fixing plant (puts nitrogen back into the soil) - inoculated with leguminous bacteria.
• General insect (especially bees) nectar plant
• Provides shelter for parasatoid wasps (beneficial wasps that prey on plant pests)
• Lacewings (beneficial insects) prefer to lay eggs on this plant
• Dynamic Accumulator (Phosphorus, Nitrogen)
• Groundcover - space plants about 1 foot (30 centimeters) apart

Yield: Not applicable

Harvesting: Not applicable

Storage: Not applicable

Many beneficial insects are attracted to Lupines.

http://stevewolf.smugmug.com/Nature/Wildlife/Bee2/506004284_2iHZn-L-2.jpg

DESIGNING WITH THIS PLANT

USDA Hardiness Zone: 3-9

AHS Heat Zone: No reliable information available

Chill Requirement: No reliable information available

Plant Type: Small to Medium-sized, Clumping Herbaceous Perennial

Leaf Type: Deciduous

Forest Garden Use: Herbaceous Layer or Groundcover Layer (depending on the species) 

Cultivars/Varieties: Many varieties available.

Pollination: Self-Pollinating/Self-Fertile - pollinated by bees

Flowering: May-July depending on the variety and USDA Zone where it is planted

Life Span: No reliable information available, but if conditions are fair to good, Lupines will self-reseed.

Harvesting Lupine flowers in Detroit - 1938

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PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THIS PLANT

Size: 1-4 feet (30-120 centimeters) tall and 1-3 feet (30-90 centimeters) wide

Roots: Fibrous network of roots

Growth Rate: Medium - Fast

Amazing photo of a field of wild Lupines near a church.

http://www.photoend.com/data/media/46/Wild%20Lupine%20and%20Church,%20Near%20Hellissandur,%20Snaefellsnes%20Peninsula,%20Iceland.jpg

Close-up of Lupine leaves - natural water catchers!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_F07iqvPbMZY/S8aKYL7uOQI/AAAAAAAAHt0/Pq7QOYbN0y4/s1600/raindrops+on+lupine.jpg

GROWING CONDITIONS FOR THIS PLANT

Light: Prefers full sun

Shade: Tolerates light shade

Moisture: Dry to Medium soils

pH: most species prefer acidic to near neutral soil (3.5 - 6.5)

Propagation: By seed (needs scarification) or by Spring cuttings of soft, basal growth. Division is reported to be difficult.

Maintenance: None

Concerns: Poisonous – There are many varieties of lupines that have toxic seeds, and the seeds can become contaminated with a fungus that produces toxins as well. If you are going to eat the seeds, really know what you are doing.

Spotted: Snow Bunting - an Artic visitor!

A beautiful Snow Bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis) in breeding plumage.

http://www.birdsasart.com/rootjpegs/snow%20bunting.jpg

I was shutting the front gate after a walk to the tidepools with my boys when I saw a blur of white and black. The bird darted past me within a few feet of my head... long enough for my brain to take a mental snapshot of its feather pattern. I had not ever seen a bird like this. I quickly went inside before the image faded from my memory and flipped through the bird identification book I had checked out from the library. There it was. A Snow Bunting. Plectrophenax nivalis. In breeding plumage. Resident of the Artic Circle!

Snow Bunting Distribution

http://www.planetofbirds.com/Master/PASSERIFORMES/Calcariidae/maps/Snow%20Bunting.gif

After a bit of research, I found that Snow Buntings visit the Azores on a pretty rare frequency, but they have been recorded here every month of the year. They Winter in warmer climates, and then they head back to the Artic Circle to breed in late Winter to Early Spring. This guy must have been trying to avoid the cold since it is already Summer here now, and he has quite a ways to go.

Male Snow Bunting in Winter.

http://parrotletsuk.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ef87d4088330147e06c92cb970b-750wi

Snow Buntings may be common where you are from, but for me, this was my first sighting. Being such a bird-nerd, I still get really excited about first spottings. I hope I never lose that.

The Art of Stacking Firewood

My first attempt at stacking firewood

Yeah, it's the middle of summer, but I just had my first load of firewood (ever) delivered yesterday. I figured it would be cheaper in the off-season, and I want to do some smoking and barbecuing in the next few weeks, so now is a good time.

I hope in the future, when I have some land, to harvest my own trees and split my own firewood, but for now I have to get it delivered. I'm okay with that, as there are so many other things I want to spend time doing.

Just to remind anyone reading this, I grew up in South Florida. There were a few people there who had fireplaces, but it was mainly for show. There may be three days a year, where you could have a fire in a fireplace without needing to turn on the air conditioning as well. Cold days were not common at all where I was raised, so at age 36, I finally stacked my first tower of firewood.

Here are a few things I learned. There really is an art to stacking firewood. It's not like stacking bricks all the same size. Trees, and the subsequent splits, are rarely straight and flat. If not stacked right, the tower is very unstable. With three kids ages four and under running around my house, I really needed to do this right. Fortunately, it didn't take me too long to get the hang of it. But I will not say it was quick to build a stable tower of irregularly shaped firewood. Also, my tower is not tremendously tall. Even more attention to stable building would be required if I build a tower higher than I did.

It was also really refreshing to be working with my body and not just my brain. As a physician, I often go days without feeling as if I accomplished anything physically productive. I love being a doctor and taking care of those who are ill, but there really is something to using my whole body to complete a task. To be honest, I don't want to do hard labor full time, but after building this tower (and five other smaller ones under the brick wall posts on the side of the house) I realized how important it is for me to be "working" outside. I often recall my friend Justin reminding me that the physics definition of work is force miltiplied by distance, so if I wasn't moving something, I wasn't really working. There is something to this. I truly believe there is something innate to the human body that desires, and maybe requires, physical work to feel complete and at peace.

A few hours after I stacked the forewood, I decided to browse the internet to see if there was anything I should have known before I started stacking the wood. As it turns out, I did everything right. I am not sure if this was an instinctual thing... likely from seeing so many stacks of wood outside homes when I lived in Kentucky and Minnesota. Maybe it was from reading articles on homesteading that covered firewood. But it was gratifying to see I did it right.

Here's to a warm winter and slow-cooked, smokey-flavored meat!

Here are some of the articles I found online:
How to Stack Firewood - Popular Mechanics
The Science of Wood Stacking - Mother Earth News
Some Thoughts on Stacking Firewood - Woodheat.org

A New Interview with Geoff Lawton

Here is another great interview with Geoff Lawton, the director of the Permaculture Research Institute, being interviewed again by Jack Spirko on the Survival Podcast. Geoff Lawton is one of the leading and most knowledgeable practioners of Permaculture today. This interview goes into more detail on the specifics of design in different climates and how to choose land. Lots of Permaculture fun!

Here's the interview.

Spotted: European Goldfinch - Flying Jewels

Male European Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/Mickledore/Goldfinch1.jpg

As I have readily admitted in the past that I am a bird-nerd, I will also admit that I stopped my car on the road and put on my flashing hazard lights when I spotted this guy in the grass hopping around with some sparrows. This is another bird that may be common where you are (if you live in Europe or the UK), but it was a first spotting for me. These are beautiful birds that I have previously only seen in photos. I was pretty stoked!

European Goldfinch in flight

http://ibc.lynxeds.com/files/pictures/Szczygiel_001_LE9I7177.jpg

http://www.avianweb.com/images/birds/finches/goldfinchdistributionmap.gif

A Weasel in My Garden!

The Least Weasel (Mustela nivalis)... resident of my garden

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1318/1350934845_f64e9d56f2.jpg

During our first week at our new home, I saw this little blur of brown and white fur run out of the garden, spin in a circle, and run right back in. It was too sleek to be a rat, so I asked one of the locals about it. He was standing with two other men, and he was the only one who spoke English, a little. I described what I saw, and he translated to the other two men. The one in the back held up his hands just under a foot (30 cm) apart and raised his eyebrows in question. Yeah, that was about the size of it, I nodded.

"Ah, niñito," he said nodding.

"Ah, niñito, yes," the other two men assuredly nodded as well.

That name seemed a bit familiar. About 10 minutes later, I was rolling my eyes after reading the google definition: Diminutive of niño small child.

This is obviously the local name for the animal. Not helpful.

A little more looking, and I discovered the animal was likely the Least Weasel. It is the smallest member of the Weasel Family (Mustelidae) as well as the smallest member of the Carnivore Order (Carnivora). It is found throughout Europe and on islands in the Atlantic (including ours in the Azores!), the Mediterranean, and Japan. It feeds mostly on rodents, and it can kill and carry an animal up to 10 times its own weight!

Then a few weeks later (a couple of days ago), right at dusk, I was standing on the porch overlooking the garden, when I saw a little furry critter slowly creep out from under the large clump of aloe plants. This clump is about ten feet (3 meters) long by four feet (1.2 meters) wide. He (or she) stepped out, walked around for about 20 seconds, and then scampered back under the aloe. Definitely a Least Weasel. Almost cute.

My first thought when I saw him come out was, "Oh great, these things can kill birds. I want to get some chickens." I wondered if I was going to have to "get rid" of the weasel somehow. But I almost immediately thought of the story of the Bullock brothers.

These three brothers had decided to start a Permaculture project on one of the islands off the coast of northwestern Washington state. They had worked for a few years to restore the flora at the water's edge including planting some "wild" foods that they also enjoyed eating, like cattails. They had a good harvest for a year, and then they noticed that most of their cattails were being raided. They eventually realized it was muskrats. As they had started to restore the land, the animals were coming back, and they were eating some of the brothers' harvest. Instead of trapping them or killing them, they decided to let nature be. For a few years, they continued to lose their cattail harvest. Then one year it seemed that the muskrats were gone. It turned out that now, thanks to a healthy muskrat population, the otters and eagles had moved back to the area, and they were feeding on the muskrats. The brothers were able to harvest some cattails again, but they shared some with the muskrats as well, and a more complex and stable food web and ecosystem was restored.

I have done something similar in the past (see my article: Hold the chemicals... see what happens!), but it was on a much, much smaller scale. However, the priciple is the same.

So, we will see what happens.

The other logical way to look at it is this... If the Least Weasel in my garden eats mice and rats and other rodents, and I have seen mice and rats in my neighborhood and in my neighbors backyard, but I have not seen any of these pests in my house or yard, then this guy is doing me a service. I will not only let him be, but I will welcome his stay.

Now we have a weasel as a neighbor.

 

Hope in a Changing Climate... an Amazing BBC Video!

Award winning film: Hope in a Changing Climate

http://cos.gmu.edu/sites/default/files/news/images/Earth's%20Hope%20Collage.jpg

I am rarely truly amazed by a video any more. That is unfortunate, but it is also all the more remarkable when it does happen. Hope in a Changing Climate amazed me. Regardless of your perspective on why the climate is changing (human created carbon damage, normal earth cycles, etc.), the Earth's climate is changing. This video ignores the controversial aspects of climate change (or global warming/global cooling/global weirding/or whatever they want to call it now...), and shows that there is a real economic, as well as environmental, conservational, agricultural, and societal reason to reverse the damage that has been done to the land. This video shows that there are whole countries working on this, not just some hippies who don't know when to bathe. This video shows that repairing the land to produce viable sustainable and restorative ecosystems that benefit humans and the natural world (this is Permaculture!) can work on a very, very large scale. Inspiring and truly amazing!

(the video is at the end...)

FROM THE BBC PRESS RELEASE FOR HOPE IN A CHANGING CLIMATE:
...a new documentary on BBC World optimistically reframes the debate on global warming. Illustrating that large, decimated eco-systems can be restored,Hope in a Changing Climate, which will have a special screening at COP15 [the 15th Conference on Climate Change], reveals success stories from Ethiopia, Rwanda and China which prove that bringing large areas back from environmental ruin is possible, and key to stabilising the earth’s climate, eradicating poverty and making sustainable agriculture a reality.

The programme documents the remarkably successful efforts of local people to restore denuded, degraded ecosystems – transforming them into verdant, life-sustaining environments which enable people to break free from entrenched poverty. The film contains breathtaking before and after footage of large-scale restoration projects. Presented by John D. Liu, founder of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP) and creator of the film Lessons of the Loess Plateau, the new programme is directed by Jeremy Bristow from the BBC, the award-winning producer of the acclaimed David Attenborough seriesThe Truth about Climate Change.

The area of restoration on the Loess Plateau in China is the size of Belgium and thousands of years of subsistence farming had made it barren and unfertile. In 1995 The Chinese Government, with support from The World Bank, took drastic action to rehabilitate the plateau, and local people – seen as both perpetuators and victims of the devastation – became part of the solution.

John D. Liu has been visiting the area for the past fifteen years and in Hope in a Changing Climate travels back to find astounding results. He said: “Human impact on the climate is not simply from the flagrant emission of carbon dioxide and began long before industrial scale emissions. Carbon disequilibrium is a symptom of a larger systemic failure – we are reducing biodiversity, and this has altered fundamental earth processes that we rely on for life. We must act as a species to restore ecosystem function wherever it has been disrupted. We know what is needed; we know it works; and we know from the history of other civilizations that have collapsed what the consequences are of failing to act – and quickly.”

The film uncovers the dramatic impact of similar projects in Ethiopia and Rwanda. Once the scene of devastating droughts in 1984, Ethiopia has used the same approach as that in China to begin bringing areas of arid land back to productivity and ecological balance. In Rwanda, where ecological degradation from over-farming of wetland areas saw the near failure of the country’s hydro-electricity supply, the Government has undertaken a similar project and seen vast improvements.

Dr Joe Smith is The Open University’s lead academic for the programme and says: “With climate change projected to hit the poorest people in the developing world worst of all ecological restoration projects are key to ensuring that future generations have security. What is refreshing about this film is that developing world scientists and policy-makers take centre stage in devising responses to environmental problems. The film also shows how ordinary people in China, Rwanda and Ethiopia play a key role in restoring and protecting their environment. It can feel disempowering to look at global issues such as climate change or biodiversity loss; but the breath-taking before and after footage from these projects shows that imaginative research and policy can generate solutions on the ground.”

Hope in a Changing Climateis produced with support from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), The Open University, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and The World Bank. The film will also be made available on The Open University’s new Creative Climate website, www.open.ac.uk/creativeclimate, which documents diverse experiences of climate change across the globe. In addition, EEMP and the George Mason University Center for Climate & Society have organised a network of research centres and nongovernmental organizations around the world to host facilitated stakeholder discussions around the themes of the film.

Here is the video, Hope in a Changing Climate:

Hope in a Changing Climate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK8z0qDtE2g