Overwintering Lupines at the Johnny's Research Farm
I'm here in our overwintered tunnel. It is the end of May, and I'm standing in front of a plot of overwintered lupines.
Lupine is a really wonderful spring flower, and for the past couple of years, we've trialed it in our over winter tunnel to see if we could get Lupines earlier than we would get them from a field planting.
This planting went in the ground in the middle of October. It overwintered really nicely. We had really good survival on all of these plants and they started flowering for us in the beginning of May and then really started producing a lot of flowers more towards the middle of May. As you can see, this plot is in full flower right now.
That puts us about 3 to 4 weeks before our field lupines are really in full flower. So this does give us a little bit of an earlier lupine season and we have both first year flowering and perennial lupine varieties planted here. We found that both of those do flower on a similar time frame in the spring from a fall planting in the overwintering tunnel.
Again, this is lupine in an overwintered tunnel. It flowers a little bit earlier than we have it in the field and could be a really nice way to extend your lupine season in an unheated tunnel.