Buckwheat progress

Well our soon to be garden is coming up strong. We planted buckwheat as a cover crop. If you are new to the idea of cover crops let me just explain that they are to grow and kill before they reach seed. For example, our buckwheat is nearing maturity, we must till it under before it can seed out, otherwise we will have more buckwheat that anyone knows what to do with. Cover crops are used as a soil amendment, to add more back than they take. So in about a week we will mow the buckwheat and get it all chopped up good, then get the rototiller and smoosh (technical term here) it into the ground, where by it will rot and give yummy's back to the soil. Sounds pretty good huh? Some call it "green manure" I like that idea because essentially that is what it is.

We plan on planting cereal rye next, which is more cold hardy and can grow into late November. Then the ground and the snow will take it so I highly doubt we will need to rototill it. But come this spring we will have to. But before we plant that we have to get our garlic, raspberries and other such "fall" plantings into the ground.

Our buckwheat is growing nicely on one side of the garden, there are two reasons for that. 1.) We didn't add as much compost to one side of garden, mainly because we ran out of time and wanted to get he buckwheat in the ground, and 2.) the freaking birds came and had a feast at our expense. I don't think we buried the seeds deep enough into the ground, we used more of a leaf rake to get it in the ground, next time we'll use a thatching rake!