Buckwheat for Beneficial Insects and Phosphorus Availability

0:00 [Music]

0:08 What we have here is buckwheat and buckwheat is really an interesting plant. We really don't have any close relatives to this plant that we grow. I mean, this is kind of it within the family. It's got some really unique characteristics. Of course you can see.

0:28 All the plumes from planting to bloom.

0:32 Buckwheat is their master. 30 days, I mean it's one of the fastest plants there is from planning to the pollen and the nectar production is really impressive. A lot of people plant this as a honeybee food or wild pollinators feed. It's also the...

0:55 Pollen and nectar are very attractive to ladybugs, lacewings, and syrphid flies. The larvae are able to eat the pollen and nectar as a prey substitute. So one of the reasons we like to plant buckwheat is as an attractor for predatory insects. Put this in summer sorghum mixes brings in the ladybugs, lacewings, and syrphid flies.

1:23 And they will live off the pollen and nectar believe it should, and then they turn around see, 'Oh fresh meat, let's go eat them.' And soon this is a very good means of biological, very low cost. A bee, sixty two cents right now counter to an acre to lot.

1:50 Cheaper than sprays a momento at 25 function anchor apiece and this particular plan is just came a volunteer here in this sunflower patch but it brings up the point that if you're going to grow sunflowers for seed production buckwheat is a fantastic companion for all those reasons that you said to get.

2:09 Some biological control head off and different under predatory bugs, but it's a really good companion crop. It grows fast and just all those flowering benefits. And then the other thing is the root system exudes a very strong acid that can help mobilize and make available phosphorus in the.

2:30 Soil that other plants just can't get to. And so it's a great plan if you've got, you know, you've got phosphorous in your soil but you don't think maybe it's available. Yeah, and you know it's hardly an impressive root system until you see what it does in the following crop. And a lot of people look for long term cover.

3:11 It is not a mycorrhizal fungi host, which was just kind of odd. Plants, one of the few non Nebraska crop plants that are not mycorrhizal hosts. And when a plant does not host mycorrhizal fungi, it has to have evolved different nutrient uptake mechanisms. And so I think some of those alternate nutrient uptake.

3:38 Mechanisms like the acid secretion provide benefits to the following crop and rotation. I would never want to plant this as a monoculture because it hosts Mike rifle funky, but it's great in the blend. Always try to throw a pound or two of this in and probably the biggest cautionary tale with buckwheat is.

3:58 Because it blooms early it's going to make seed, probably make it viable seed six to seven weeks after planting. And so if you're going to have buckwheat in your cover crop mix, just you have to kind of know that it's going to make some seed. Like this guy was a volunteer out here, you're going to see.

4:13 That, but even in organic situations where they can't chemical it and it's easy to chemically control, yes, but even in organic situations we have a lot of organic guys that use buckwheat and they just, it's not that big of a deal to have a little volunteer buckwheat popping up here and there because it's chemically controlled in a non-organic situation and it's not going to be overly competitive in an organic field.