if i had to pick just one warm season cover crop buckwheat would be my pick of all the options for
the home garden i feel like buckwheat offers the most advantages and is the easiest to use
the biggest reason that i love this cover crop is how quickly it grows and smothers out weeds
at optimal temperatures which are right around 70 degrees buckwheat will germinate as quickly
as three to four days and it reaches flowering in as little as three to four weeks completing its
entire life cycle in 10 to 12 weeks and because of this rapid growth it can out compete pretty
much all the other weeds in your garden now not only does it offer quick growth right out of the
gate but it will also give me quick regrowth so if buckwheat is mowed down before it reaches about 25
bloom it will actually grow back and often grow back even bigger and bushier than prior to cutting
the other thing is if you let it flower and go to seed it will sprout up very very easily on its own
so you can get two consecutive cover crops with only doing the planting work one time now another
reason i love buckwheat is because it's very tolerant of poor soils and it can help improve
the texture of heavy soil so buckwheat has a lot of fine little roots that work their way into the
topsoil effectively breaking it up and making it more friable so buckwheat will do well even
on soils that are low fertility it will also grow in soils where there is a high content of actively
decomposing organic matter buckwheat also acts as a phosphorus scavenger meaning that it can uptake
phosphorus and then after it is cut and begins to decompose into the ground it will release
the phosphorus making it more readily available to whatever your subsequent vegetable crops are
and a final advantage and maybe one of my most favorite things about buckwheat is how it draws in
the beneficial insects and the pollinators of all the things that i plant in my garden
i probably see more insect activity on my buckwheat blooms than anything else and a
final non-cover crop related benefit chickens love buckwheat both the foliage and the seeds
so if you're raising chickens and you just want to plant a plot of buckwheat and let your
chickens loose in it or cut some off and throw it to them they love it and it provides a lot of good
nutrition for them as well buckwheat is frost tender so you want to plant it any time after
your danger of frost has passed in the spring or about four to six weeks before
your first estimated fall frost date in the fall i typically just broadcast so my buckwheat seed
it can also be drilled in at about a half an inch depth but for me in a small space in the garden
it's easy just to broadcast sew it and then tamp it in either with my feet or with the head of a
rake or something like that and on a smaller scale planting the recommended rate is about
one pound of buckwheat seed per 500 square feet of garden now buckwheat needs very very minimal care
i try to always plant it before rain is forecasted that way i don't have to do any watering if i do
anything at all it's just a little watering in the beginning to get the seed going and established
after that it gets nothing i don't water it i don't fertilize it i just let it do its thing
now because buckwheat is so quick to mature and go to seed the general recommendation is to terminate
the cover crop seven to ten days after flowering begins this is going to give you optimal biomass
optimal nutrition release in the soil as well as preventing the seed from dropping and then
coming up in places in the garden where you don't want it to come up that being said i
often wait too long to cut mine down and it does go to seed i've never had an issue with it even
if it comes up in my vegetable beds it's very very easy to pull and sometimes as i mentioned
before i get twice the cover crop coverage in a row without doing the work of reseeding
buckwheat is very very easy to terminate if you time it out to where it's maturing at the
time of your first frost you can just let it frost kill otherwise if you want to terminate it in the
middle of the season when it's still warm you can easily mow it you can cut it with a weed whacker
and a tiny plot you can cut it with the scissors or you can just till it into the ground
and once you've cut all that foliage down you have two options you can either leave it lay on top of
the soil as a mulch and using this method it's going to be slower to break down and it's going
to continue to suppress weeds from popping up the other option is to work it into the soil right
away and this option is going to allow the residue to release nutrients and more quickly break down
in the soil now as i mentioned before buckwheat is one of my absolute favorites and it's mainly
because of that quickness in the versatility so anytime there is a hole in the garden i will come
in and sew it with buckwheat seed just to get some soil coverage so weeds aren't sprouting up
and it is so easy to use on any scale i've used it in as small a place as my raised beds before
all the way up to multi-acre plantings and i'd love to hear from you if you use buckwheat in
your garden what is the main reason that you like it as a cover crop and if you found this
video helpful be sure to subscribe to my channel grow fully with jenna for more videos on using
different types of cover crops in the home garden thanks for watching and i'll see you next time