just a lil pinch of buckwheat anyone??? :)

One year I had planted some crimson clover as a round garden in the middle of the lawn. It was a defined gardenbed as I had put in edging. One day my neighbor asked me when I was going to pull those weeds as they were so ugly. No one wanted to believe that I actually planted them there. Actually the crimson clover is really very pretty. I guess I was lucky that no one noticed all the brown millet and white millet I also used to have as ornimental grasses. When I used to have a larger space for my veggie garden (before I started putting daylily gardens at both ends) I used to plant buckwhet in a space that was about 4 feet wide by 14 feet long. I thought of it as my space to attract bees.

Mia, Yes , I think it will work. Interplanting tomatoes with other crops is something I do all the time. I often grow smaller plants like lettuce and carrots underneath and between tomato plants, essentially using them as a living mulch beneath the taller tomato plants. I also mix all kinds of herbs into the tomato beds as well, and think those herbs help explain how I grow so many tomato plants and yet only rarely see even a single tomato hornworm or fruit worm. You sometimes will get less yield per plant when you interplant multiple kinds of crops together using close spacing, but since you have a lot more plants occupying the soil, you still get a good harvest . The best carrot crop I ever had was a result of me broadcast sowing lettuce and carrot seed randomly into the tomato bed after the tomato plants already had been transplanted into the ground. My garden was smaller then and I had run out of space, so was packing as much into each bed as I possibly could. I just thinned carrots and lettuce after they sprouted. When I grow onions with tomato plants, normally I hammer a stake into the ground where each tomato plant will be planted later, and leave a small unplanted spot there as I plant the onions. When it it time to transplant the tomato plants into the ground, I put one tomato plant next to each stake. If I have to pull up a couple of onions to make room for a tomato transplant, it isn't a big deal . We eat those onions as scallions. I started interplanting multiple types of plants together long ago, after reading John Jeavon's book "How To Grow More Vegetables...." book. It is amazing how much you can pack into even a small space when you interplant. Even when I grow tomato plants in molasses feed tubs, I generally have pepper plants, herbs and flowers mixed into each container with the tomato plants. Look at how Mother Nature mixes everything up together. On the eastern edge of our woodland, for example, we have native pecan and oak trees growing as the dominant plants, but underneath them we have wild cherries, American persimmons, possumhaw hollies, and redbuds, and beneath those understory trees we have American beautyberry bushes, native blackberries, inland sea oats and brushy bluestem, peppervines and several native wildflowers which ebb and flow with the seasons. All of them happily co-exist. Why can't our gardens be the same way? To garden bio-intensively in this manner, you need to pay careful attention to soil fertility and irrigation (if adequate rainfall is not being received). Obviously when you interplant several types of edible crops together, the plants will be competing with one another. I get smaller onions in interplanted beds than I get from onions grown in a monoculture with recommended spacing, but still get tons of onions. We still have several dozen onions from last year's crop, though now they are starting to sprout. There pretty much is nothing grown in our veggie garden that isn't interplanted with several other things. If I ever were to plant even one single monoculture bed, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like the way it looked and would be out there trying to fix the bed by adding more stuff to it. In fact, I do have my onions planted as monoculture beds right now, but that is because they are the only thing I've put into the ground so far this year. The onions will not be alone in those beds for long. Hope this helps , Dawn

Last year I planted buckwheat in a newly tilled 1000 ft/sq bed. It grew well but when it was time to cut it down in early July it was too wet and then I went on vacation and came home to a crop of buckwheat gone to seed. I cut it down with a weed eater. A couple weeks later the seed sprouted again and I let it grow for a couple weeks and then mowed it down and then tilled in mid august and broadcast Groundhog radish seed for a winter cover crop. Well there was a lot of buckwheat seed left after tilling so I had a mixed crop of buckwheat and radish. About mid September the buckwheat got to about 2' tall while the groundhog was about 1 foot tall so not wanting the buckwheat to go to seed again I took the weed eater in a chopped the buckwheat down just above the tops of the radishes. The remaining 1' or so of the buckwheat did not continued to grow much but it did set flowers again very low on the plant and went to seed. Still have some buckwheat popping up in that bed here and there amongst the sweet corn to this day.