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Buckwheat is good to soil and your taste budsBy Lee ReichAssociated Press Nature clothes bare soil to protect it and improve it — so why don’t you? If you let nature choose the wardrobe in unused areas of the garden, you get weeds. Plant buckwheat instead — two or three handfuls every 100 square feet. You’re not sowing buckwheat for homegrown kasha or knishes, but rather as a cover crop, a plant grown to improve the soil. Like other cover crops, buckwheat enriches the soil with humus. Buckwheat grows well even in poor soils, making nutrients more available to subsequent plantings. The dense growth shades out weeds and the white flowers play host to beneficial insects such as syrphid flies and ladybugs. Besides these benefits, buckwheat is worth planting just to bring a bit of history into the garden. The plant is native to central Siberia and Manchuria, but was brought to Europe in the 16th century. The Germans became fond of this grain, and the German word buchweizen became the English word buckwheat. By the beginning of the 17th century, buckwheat was already being grown on this side of the Atlantic — on Manhattan Island. When grown for soil improvement, buckwheat is deliberately killed while in flower. Usually it is dug into the soil, but easier — and better for the soil — is to just knock or mow it down. Leave the leafy stems in place or cart them to the compost pile. Even easier is to let frost kill the plant. You could, of course, let buckwheat grow and then harvest the grain, which matures about 70 days after planting. Cut down the plants just as the first seeds are ripening because if you wait until all the grains are mature, too many will have already fallen on the ground. Once the stems have dried, knock the plants around over a piece of cloth to thresh out the grains. Separate the dark hulls from the grains by whirling them around in a blender or lightly pounding them. Pour the mixture back and forth between two large bowls in a slight breeze to blow away the chaff. Expect a yield of a 2 to 3 quarts of grain, or a stack of buckwheat pancakes about 5 feet high, per 100 square feet of buckwheat planted. Pretty good for a 10 by 10 plot, not to mention that you also get soil improvement, weed control, attraction of beneficial insects — and a sea of white flowers toward the end of summer. [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
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