Buckwheat has been a useful crop for me, and I’m sure it will be one of the staples here. I’ve planted a few stands, starting back in Winter, so I’m getting a feel for growing buckwheat in our conditions.
Growing buckwheat
First up, although it grows through our mild Winter, it does better in the warmer months, and copes perfectly well with warm and wet conditions. I got a big bag of seeds as a cover crop/chicken feeder crop, which will last me through this year as well. If I needed to save seed it would be easy to collect a kilo or so, but a handful of seeds covers quite a few square metres of bed.
Buckwheat is a very quick grower. The bed in the Mid-levels was one I prepared in early December, but I wanted to leave it to settle, germinate weeds, etc before planting, so I broadcast some buckwheat. The sequence below shows how fast they grow.
By February they had been flowering and seedling pretty freely, so I pulled the plants and brought them up to the chickens, which had a good feed. The whole stems thrown in the yard were cleaned up in short time, leaving the stems as mulch.
The bed was then ready for digging over, and is now settling for a vegetable crop. One of the reputed benefits of buckwheat is that its long roots break up the soil and bring nutrients to the surface. It tends to re-seed, but it hasn’t become weedy for me, and I tend to leave the odd plants to grow and flower if they’re not in the way, as the bees love them.
Buckwheat is not fussy about soil and apparently is considered a good crop for poor or exhausted soils. Of course you get a better yield from a better soil.
You can eat the leaves and flowers too. I’ve used them as an addition to salads and they have a nice taste. If you’re unfamiliar with the seeds, they are black, triangular and about 4 mm long. If I had a mill I would certainly grow and keep a bucket for flour, as I like the pancakes and the bought flour can be stale. For now, my kitchen buckwheat and garden buckwheat are separate.
By the way, the ‘wheat’ part of the name just signifies grain, and they are not a grass at all, as you can see from the photos. Online Etymology Dictionary says the ‘buck’ part comes from a resemblance to beech seed.