Buckwheat In The Garden

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Groats, melliferous, ornamental and green manure crops in our gardens

A Russian proverb says: "Buckwheat porridge is our mother, and rye loaf is our dear father." It is impossible to say more fully about the most important and vital products for the Russian person.

Buckwheat contains on average up to 14% protein, 77% starch, over 3% fatty oil, 2.4% ash in grain. Buckwheat is preferred to millet and other cereals for high dietary qualities associated with the presence of a large percentage of iron, phosphorus, calcium and copper, as well as organic acids (citric, oxalic, malic) and B vitamins. Buckwheat flour is added to some types of bread, confectionery, in special varieties of vermicelli. Buckwheat bran is a good concentrated feed for pigs and chickens.

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Buckwheat straw is fed to pets with a known precaution, as it can cause itchy skin and hair loss in animals. Rutin containing vitamin PP is extracted from buckwheat leaves.

This vitamin has great healing properties and is used for complications after X-ray irradiation in violation of vascular permeability caused by radiation to prevent hemorrhage. Blooming buckwheat is one of the good honey plants readily visited by bees (up to 100 kg of honey per 1 hectare). In addition to bees, buckwheat is visited by more than 90 species of insects.

In different years, the sown area of buckwheat in Russia ranged from 1.2 to 2 million hectares. But its yield was and remains low (0.3-0.8 t / ha). This is due to violations in the cultivation technology, and to the biological characteristics of buckwheat. This is coupled with a number of its morphological and physiological characteristics - along with growth, flowering, fruit formation and ripening of a part of the fruits occurs, intensive branching and growth of the vegetative mass continues.

These morphological properties of the culture create great tension in providing plants with water and nutrients. The root system of buckwheat is rather weak, it spreads to a depth of 30-35 cm, in old age - up to 40 cm. In this case, the root hairs die off on the thirtieth day of life.

Flowers of different quality (dimorphism) open and pollinate only under favorable weather conditions. Therefore, at the end of the growing season, only 10-15% of the fruits of the total number of flowers are formed on the plant.

Currently, about 50 varieties of buckwheat have been zoned in Russia, and many of them provide a yield of up to 3 t / ha. In the North-West, including in the Leningrad region, in the past, more than 2 t / ha of buckwheat grain was obtained.

The botanical name for buckwheat is Fagopyrum Gaertn. So she was named by Gertner for the similarity of the fruit to the fruit of a beech. The genus of buckwheat includes 5 species, but only Fagopyrum esculentum (cultivated buckwheat) is of practical importance.

Researchers believe that buckwheat originates from the Himalayas. It was brought to Russia by the Tatars in the 18th century from Asia. This, apparently, can explain the name of buckwheat - "Tatar", used by the Western Slavic and Baltic peoples (Poles, Slovenes, Estonians, Finns, etc.).

Its fruits, together with grains of wheat, barley and rice, were found in a number of burial grounds left by Slavic tribes (northerners and glades). Buckwheat entered the culture on the territory of our country, at the earliest, in the feudal period, that is, much later than oats and even rye, but it received very rapid recognition from the population and took the second place in terms of sown area after rye.

Modern buckwheat varieties have a growing season of 65 to 100 days, due to which in a number of regions it is cultivated as a stubble and post-harvest crop. It belongs to the plants of a short day and grows best with 16-18 hours of daylight hours. This culture is thermophilic, therefore it is sown when the soil warms up to 6 … 8 ° С, but more friendly shoots appear at a temperature of 13 … 16 ° С. Buckwheat seedlings are very sensitive to frost. When the temperature drops to -2 … -2.5 ° C, leaves, flowers and stems are damaged, and at a lower temperature the plants die. The crop yield increases if the weather is warm (16 … 18 ° C) and normally humid during flowering.

Buckwheat is moisture-loving, demanding on nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, soils (pH - 5-6.5). This culture is a good predecessor for other cultures. Thanks to the branched root system and the organic acids it secretes, hard-to-reach phosphorus compounds are assimilated from the soil.

The assimilation capacity of buckwheat roots is 7-8 times greater than that of winter wheat and 1.5 times that of millet. On the experimental field of the Department of Plant Growing of the St. Petersburg State Agrarian University (St. Petersburg State Agrarian University) in the city of Pushkin, we grew buckwheat of the Kazan large-fruited variety. They were sown in ordinary (after 15 cm) and wide-row methods (after 30 cm) in the first and second ten days of May as the soil matured.

Our studies were carried out in 2007 and 2008 on various agro-backgrounds, providing for ancient fertilizers - wood ash (2 c / ha), mineral fertilizers (N60P60K90) and a bacterial preparation consisting of rhizosphere nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria.

Bacterial preparations with various strains of nitrogen-fixing rhizosphere bacteria (they settle not in the roots of plants, as in legumes, but near the roots) are introduced into the soil when sowing seeds and on vegetative plants. Employees of the Department of Plant Industry of St. Petersburg State Agrarian University investigate biological products in all field crops. The increase in yield from the use of atmospheric nitrogen by plants due to the activity of soil bacteria ranges from 20 to 200%.

These biological products were created at the All-Russian Research Institute of Agricultural Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and are widely introduced into production. Biopreparations of the Extrasol-f group are especially widely used: agrophil, mizorin, rhizoagrin, azorizin, flavobacterin, each of which increases the yield and product quality of a group or several groups of agricultural crops (grain, vegetable, table tubers, forage grasses, fodder roots, etc.).d.).

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Bacteria, in addition to nitrogen fixation, secrete substances that protect vegetable, green and fruit crops from diseases, increase the starch content of potato tubers by 15-20%, increase the content of ascorbic acid by 20-50%, and the infection of plants and tubers with diseases decreases by 5%. 10 times. On lawn cereal grasses, the density doubles, and the chlorophyll content increases (by 30-45%).

Beneficial rhizosphere bacteria, colonizing the root zone of plants (rhizosphere) and the surface of the roots, displace pathogenic bacteria (1 g of the preparation contains up to 10 billion bacteria).

They produce natural antibiotics, secrete growth-stimulating substances (analogs of auxins and heteroauxins) and vitamins, fix nitrogen from the atmospheric air (0.3-0.4 kg / day) and feed plants with them, which is equivalent to adding 6-8 kg of ammonium nitrate or 300-400 kg of manure per one hundred square meters.

In our experiments on buckwheat, during sowing, we introduced rhizoagrin - 0.3 kg / ha. The growing season of buckwheat variety Kazanskaya large-fruited in the conditions of the Leningrad region was 128-138 days in 2007 and 123 days in 2008. Flowering of plants and ripening of fruits lasted until October 10-15. And the phase of budding and flowering begins in the North-West from the second decade of June.

If you sow buckwheat as a cover crop in the aisles of the garden under apple trees, between bushes of black and red currants, in flower beds, near paths as an ornamental plant, it will delight you with a white-pink carpet right down to the snow.

We mow buckwheat in the garden when apples start to fall, and in late autumn or spring, when digging, we embed plant residues in the soil. It is noted that the number of pests (slugs, Colorado beetles) becomes much less if the plantings are sown with buckwheat.

Buckwheat seeds are sold to gardeners in all specialized stores. It should be sown when the frost has passed, but in the spring of 2008 in our experimental field the seedlings were not damaged by frost even during the strongest frost on the night of June 6-7. Blooming buckwheat in the garden attracts bees, bumblebees and other pollinators, which is important for all crops grown in the garden.

For beekeepers, buckwheat crops are a must. In 2008, I also added phacelia to buckwheat, which is not only a wonderful honey plant, but also a magnificent decorative flower, branching well and blooming until late autumn.

The highest yield of buckwheat seeds was obtained by us in 2007 on row crops (300 seeds per 1 m2) - 1.17 t / ha and stems - 2.69 t / ha of air-dry mass (total 3.86 t / ha) with the introduction of N60P60K90 … Ash was also introduced - 0.95 t / ha, the bacterial preparation rhizoagrin - 0.88 t / ha. This is a good harvest for the Northwest. With wide-row sowing, the grain yield was lower and amounted to 0.61-0.74 t / ha. Fruit set was 20-28%.

The number of flowers on a buckwheat plant with wide-row sowing (150 seeds per 1 m²) is higher - up to 784 pieces, and with a row sowing 325-507 pieces. In 2008, the weather conditions in terms of heat and moisture supply were significantly worse than in 2007, and therefore, in the development of buckwheat, a decrease in flowers to 325-454 pieces per plant was noted, and the yield of fruits was 0.22-0.76 t / ha. Fruit set in the control was 10-12%, and with the use of biological products 23-31%.

Our research and my scientific experience as a gardener allow us to recommend buckwheat as a cereal, melliferous, decorative and green manure culture in the conditions of the North-West of Russia. And in traditional regions of cultivation, the possibilities of its use are simply unlimited.