PlantFiles: Buckwheat
Fagopyrum esculentum

What a shame most gardeners don't think about this adorable little bloom for their own gardens. It's not just for the country folk.

Honey bees just love Buckwheat, thus the draw. Simply drop a few seeds into a pot and stand back to watch. You'll love growing this easy annual.

Decided you don't like it? (Though how could you not?)
Simply yank it up. End of discussion.

Too cute to pass up. Adorable when planted in a pot
then placed into an apple basket.

I use buckwheat as a quick ground cover after potatoes, early corn or any crop that I do not plant another vegetable after. It may be folklore, but it is said to draw minerals from the soil, so if the land is to be fallowed, I plant buckwheat and then in the fall disc it and plant winter rye (grain). The weeds from buckwheat are comparatively easy to control. And the pancakes are great!

And don't forget, the seeds can be ground into buckwheat flour, my absolute favorite for pancakes, good muffins too.

I grow buckwheat as a green manure crop and as a weedbeater. It has such a short seed to bloom cycle (20 days) that it can out-grow and thus kill even the most persistent perennial weed. And it is pretty.

Buckwheat is a good warm season (summer) cover crop. Sow it after the last frost date.

It has a couple good benefits: Firstly, it is a good weed control. For some reason, a lot of grassy weeds will get killed by Buckwheat, while other weeds survive. I planted an entire field of buckwheat once, and it totally devastated the grass population in that field, leaving alone the plantain and poke weeds. Buckwheat is excellent for killing off quackgrasses and rhizone-based pasture grass.

Secondly, buckwheat contributes phosphorus into the soil.

I grow buckwheat all the time, anywhere that I will have bare soil for any amount of time.