Stacking Functions on the Homestead • Homestead Lady

Would you like to save money, time, and effort on the homestead? Then learn all you can about stacking functions to make the most of each homestead element you already have in place and future elements that will be a part of your homestead over time. From chickens to sunflowers to apple trees to insects, everything on your homestead can perform more than one important function!

Stacking functions is a phrase you hear a lot in permaculture circles. Permaculture is relevant to homesteaders in that its principles and application can help us:

• obtain yields from the land
• live more abundantly
• conserve and sequester energy and resources
• make use of what we already have on the homestead

And so much more!

One of my goals as a homestead author and permaculture designer is to explain why permaculture is relevant to homesteaders. My hope is that this information will interest you enough to explore permaculture principles on your own.

Once a homesteader learns to intentionally design their homestead space with permaculture, the only limit becomes their imagination! The land, the animals, the people, the plants can present more abundance that we previously thought possible.

To learn more about permaculture and how it might apply to your homestead, please visit the following when you have time:

A Brief Introduction to Permaculture

Plan a Permaculture Homestead Layout

Permaculture Zones on the Homestead

What Does it Mean to Stack Functions?

In permaculture homestead parlance, stacking functions means to arrange homestead elements in such a way that they can perform many jobs in their place. The goal of stacking functions also includes linking homestead elements so that they can support each other.

This maximizes their potential use for present and future needs. 

• Have you ever owned a multipurpose tool? You know, those gadgets that are pliers, scissors, a knife, a saw, and a bottle opener all-in-one? 

These tools are a great example of stacking functions!

Homestead Elements = Multipurpose Tools!

Now, imagine that your chickens, the sunflowers in your garden, your apple tree, and even the insects on the homestead can do the same thing in their sphere as the multipurpose tool.

The goal of a permaculture homestead is to create systems wherein the homestead becomes a collection of multi-purpose tools all linked together.

Each homestead element – chickens, weeds, apple trees, bugs – is a workhorse capable of answering many needs. When we see them this way we save potential dollars and energy.

If the various parts of our homestead are fulfilling the needs of our homestead, then we have no need to bring in outside products, as an example of only one cost saving potential.

Stacking Functions on the Permaculture Homestead

Rosemary Morrow points out in her book, Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture, that there are basically two practical ways we can stack functions on the homestead. :

1. Stacking functions in space.
2. Stacking functions in time.

There are other ways to get the most out of each element – seasonally, culturally, even structurally (where our buildings are placed). But these two are a good start.

Stacking Functions in Space

One of our jobs as stewards of the homestead is to spend a lot of time observing and interacting with our land, or space. If we get as many uses as possible out of each inch of space we have, then we may eventually be able to reach self-sufficiency!

If nothing else, we’ll certainly be able to reduce the amount of inputs that originate outside our homestead and which usually cost money and time to use.

For example, instead of purchasing products to see to the needs of your garden, you could simply use the plants themselves. You can densely plant a vegetable garden with herbs and flowers to:

• attract pollinators
• detract undesirable insects
• produce plant mulch (also called green mulch)
• shade the soil from hot summer sun

And so much more!

Herbs and flowers have intrinsic value in their own right for their culinary and decorative value. However, they also do all the things listed above without any extra effort.

This dense planting is often referred to as companion planting, or in permaculture parlance, guild planting. To learn more about guild planting, you can visit these two articles when you have time:

How to Plant a Vegetable Guild in 7 Steps

How to Plant a Fruit Tree in a Permaculture Orchard – this article has a free download to help you visualize creating a fruit tree guild.

Stacking Functions in Time

Another way to stack functions is to make the most of the time and seasons on the homestead. You can design and schedule homestead systems so that they connect to and compliment each other.

1. For example, radishes mature in about 30 days from seed to finished root. Pumpkins mature in about 100 days.
2. You can interplant radish around your pumpkin vines when the vines are babies. As they grow, the pumpkin vines will shade the soil to keep the radishes cool and moist.
3. Before the vines get so big they overpower the radishes, it’s time to harvest the delicious little root vegetable! 
4. As the season advances and the summer wanes, the pumpkin vines will eventually die back leaving room for radishes once again!

Other Homestead Examples of Stacking Functions

We’re going to run through four more examples of stacking functions on the land that will resonate with homesteaders.

Stacking Functions with Chickens

Chickens are perhaps the most common homestead livestock, and so I’m using them in this example. However, these points could also apply to homestead ducks, geese, turkeys, quail, and guinea hens!

1. Chickens are usually kept on homesteads for their egg production, and often for their meat production. These are two great services, but poultry can provide so many more assets. 
2. Poultry are excellent foragers when put on grass or pasture. They can reduce the need for purchased feed simply by naturally eating the way they do. (If your homestead is small, you can sprout whole grain to supplement their diet, which provides more nutrition for less money.)
3. Part of what a chicken will forage along with the grass is bugs! Chickens are omnivores, so they will happily eat up the grubs and larvae of noxious pests, but they will also eat mature insects like ticks and flies.
4. Chickens also perform light tilling as they move about the homestead, scratching as they go. This talent can be put to good use if you’re tired of turning your compost and would like the chickens to do it for you.

Chicken Poop Function

Chickens produce waste that is considered hot and when allowed to fall into straw or wood chips, this manure gets and stays warm. This fantastic action can be used during the winter to naturally warm not only the chicken coop, but the greenhouse, as well.

In turn, the greenhouse can provide fresh greens in winter for the chickens to keep their health up in those cold months.

To capitalize on this function, it’s necessary to locate the chickens or chicken coop next to the greenhouse. This is an example of how we can connect even buildings and structures to better make use of stacked functions.

If you’re on a small homestead and chickens aren’t your thing, see if you can brainstorm ways these other livestock for small homesteads might be able to stack functions for you.

Stacking Functions with Plants

We’re going to use the examples of sunflowers (an annual flower) and apple trees (a perennial tree) to further show how plants can stack functions.

Annual plants begin and complete their life cycle within the growing season (or year). Their root systems are more shallow than perennial plants which live year after year as permanent fixtures on the homestead.

Perennial plants like apple trees sequester larger amounts of water and nutrients (like carbon and nitrogen) in the soil than annual plants. However, annuals have their place on the homestead!

For example, sunflowers perform over 15 different functions on the homestead! Here’s an excerpt from our article How to Grow Sunflower Seeds for Maximum Yields,

Besides gorgeous flowers and bounteous seeds, learning how to grow sunflowers can provide you with other benefits to the homestead. 

1. The color and symmetry of sunflowers, as well as their pollen and nectar stores, attract beneficial insects of all kinds.
2. They also have large, umbrella-like leaves that shade the ground beneath them, keeping it cooler and helping it retain moisture.
3. Sunflower roots go deep into the soil, alleviating compaction and mining nutrients from deeper in the substrate than most annual flowers can achieve in their limited growing time.
4. Sunflowers put off a lot of biomass, which is a fancy way of saying they produce lots of flowers, leaves, and stems. All this material makes a great addition to the compost pile.

To read about the other functions of sunflowers, please visit the article.

Apple Trees Aren’t Just For Fruit!

I mentioned apple trees above and just wanted to touch back on them as great assets to the homestead that stack multiple functions. The following attributes are true for pretty much any perennial fruit tree or bush:

1. Apple trees do produce harvestable fruit, but they also drop a good deal of fruit. Chickens or other livestock foraging underneath fruit trees benefit from 100% free food. They also clean up the orchard, thereby preventing disease and pests from spreading.
2. Fruit trees provide sturdy structure for vining plants, even grapes! No need to purchase or build a trellis when you have fruit trees. As I mentioned at the beginning, you can explore this idea further in fruit tree guilds. (How to Plant a Fruit Tree in a Permaculture Orchard – this article has a free download to help you visualize creating a fruit tree guild.)
3. When espaliered, apple trees can provide a living fence. If your garden is small, the ability of an apple and pear tree to be espaliered means you can grow tree fruit even in very tight spaces. Golden Thyme Homestead can introduce you to espalier of fruit trees so you can determine if it’s something you’d like to try.
4. As with any tree, apple trees provide shade, which can cool an area, as well as help the area retain water. If you need a shade tree, consider planting a fruit tree to achieve several functions from one tree!

Stacking Functions with Insects

Some of use automatically think of the word “bug” and are put off by it, but bugs are vital to the healthy ecology of our homesteads.

Permaculture design is based on something called systems thinking. That is, seeing how everything in nature is connected to each other and how those connections function to create what we call nature or ecology.

Stacking functions is a huge part of systems thinking when it comes to setting up our homesteads. Even as we’re vetting homestead property before we buy it, we can train ourselves to look around for potential stacked functions with whatever is already on site.

This includes insects!

Benefits of Insects

Here are just a few examples of how vital insects are to the health of our homesteads and the world at large.

1. Pollinating insects, especially honey bees and mason bees, are responsible for the pollinating of around 70% of the world’s food crops. Imagine life without blueberries!
2. Wasp-type insects provide a large portion of wild birds’ diets. On the homestead, we can grow soldier flies and mealworms to supplement their feed. (Check out the Small Livestock for Small Homesteads article for more information.)
3. Predatory insects like ground beetles eat up noxious garden pests as they emerge from the soil. Spiders will similarly take care of garden pests.
4. Dragonflies are voracious consumers of mosquitoes, which are obnoxious and spread disease.
5. Aquatic bugs keep water systems clean of natural debris, thereby helping them stay safe and healthy.
6. Parasitic wasps lay their eggs on the backs of tomato hornworms, as an awesomely gross example of how these insects can use noxious bugs as food for their young.

To encourage the population of beneficial insects on your homestead, please consider the following articles:

How to Prepare for Bee Keeping

Ground Cover Plants for Pollinators

Best Herbs for Honey Bees

Start a Butterfly Garden with Butterfly Bush

Homestead Community Example of Stacking Functions

People represent stacked functions, too, especially in the homesteading community. It’s not possible for each homesteader to know how to do everything there is potential to do on a homestead or in becoming self-sufficient!

Think about the person who first taught you how to make jam. That person also touched on the subjects of:

• storage for home-preserved products
• growing your own food to preserve
• where to purchase the best canning supplies
• the different kinds of sugar you could potentially use in your jam

So much information and discussion from just one person!

It’s imperative that we share what we know with each other so that we spread the knowledge around, making our community more stable for everyone. Imagine what would have happened if our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had abandoned jam-making once store bought jam was readily available?!

• Homesteading skills are a mere generation away from being lost if we don’t keep them alive and open-sourced. This sharing and teaching grows our community and keeps us connected and protected.

Connection and strength are at the heart of the concept of stacking functions!

Here are some articles for you to consider on building homestead community function:

3 Practical Ways to Become a Homestead Mentor

How to Host a Farm Tour for Children

15 Service Project Ideas for Kids

Family Example of Stacking Functions

Family’s are full of stacked functions! Parents provide for the family’s needs economically, but they also provide:

• emotional and spiritual support
• a loving, safe environment
• education and discipline
• family focus and planning

And so much more!

Children, too, bring so many assets to the family in the various functions they perform. They can certainly contribute to livestock chores and garden chores!

However, they also share their boundless energy that keeps us motivated to continue in the work of the homestead. They are natural scientists who constantly question, thereby keeping our minds open to new ideas and ways of thinking.

Children also force us to stop and recreate periodically – what an asset that is to work-focused adults!

The homestead is a perfect placed to sync and connect these human cycles and relationships. Work bonds us together through shared toil and purpose. Family times strengthen our commitment to each other, even when times are rocky.

Improve Family Function by Making Connections

I actually wrote our book, Homestead Holidays, because I wanted to give homestead families a way to connect their families to the work of the homestead while enjoying celebratory times together.

Each time we build a connection to each other and to the land, we strengthen the whole of our family life. In essence, we stack function upon use upon role upon purpose in our homestead family life until we’ve created a solid, foundational whole.

If our families don’t currently function in the way that we might wish, we can begin today to  make improvements. One homestead project, one special holiday, one meaningful interaction on the land at a time.

Stacking Functions to Close the Loop

When we get the most out of our homestead design and systems, we are able to provide for ourselves in new and meaningful ways. We become less reliant on outside products or materials to run our homesteads.

This achievement is called closing the loop.

Think of yourself as being surround on the homestead by an orbit of products and services that are brought onto the land to help you reach your goals. The connection of needs and solutions form a circle, or loop, all around.

• Each loop has a weakness, though, in that it could disappear at any time because it comes from outside our sphere on influence on the homestead. In short, the loop’s weakness is that the homestead doesn’t produce it.

For example, if you consistently purchase fertilizer or animal feed that must be shipped to you or to your own, that represents an open hole in your loop. One trucking strike, spiked gas prices, a manufacturing facility fire, or any other disaster will threaten your ability to fertilize your pastures and gardens, and feed your animals.

• Now, what if you could close that gap in the loop by producing fertilizer and feed on your homestead? Even if only a percentage of your annual needs?

This is something for your to ponder as you do further research and brainstorming. Be sure to keep track of your notes in your homestead journal!

Stacking Function Homework

If you’d like to ponder the idea of stacking functions on the homestead a little further, consider doing the following exercises:

1. Take your homestead journal or a notebook and go outside to sit for at least an hour. Write down or draw at least five elements. These could be: grass, a cat, wild birds, an herb plant, and your child. Or whatever it is you see when you look around.
2. Make a list of the functions each element performs on your homestead.
3. Note any of these functions that intersect – do they connect in any way? 
4. Do you see a need with one element that can be answered using another element?
5. If you’ve drawn pictures, draw connecting lines between the pictures. How do these elements intersect either in time or place?

For example does your cat chase the wild birds? Does your child pick the herbs? Do the wild birds scratch and peck in the grass?

Here’s another thing to think about: Do you see sticks in your  yard? Here are some of the many things you can do with sticks around the homestead.

Can you make similar connections with grass, cats, birds, herbs, and your kids?

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