# Koto Buckwheat - anyone have experience with it?



## Setternut (Jul 9, 2015)

I have a farm where some of the crop ground has not been well taken care of for a while. It is short of usable phosphorus. Buckwheat is good at scavenging P and making it available for the next crop.

I started looking to see what kind of seed is available in the area. The local coop has Koto Buckwheat seed for about $47 per 50# bag. I will be planting about 4 acres around the perimeter of an alfalfa field. 

Anyone have any experience with the Koto strain?


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## tech.35058 (Jul 29, 2013)

I have used "Mann can" which worked well for me in Alabama.
I have used "generic" buckwheat, which the bees ignored.
I used some "generic Japanese buckwheat", which the bees also liked. I think it might have been the "mancan" with out the label.
I have not done a soil test, so cant say much about that.
I think Kelly's &/or Dadant sell bee friendly buckwheat also.
Good Luck! ... CE


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## Schultz (Mar 9, 2015)

I planted 4 acres of that variety last year. The bees worked it heavily from the time it started blooming from 9am until about 1 or 2pm every day. After that they went back to clover and knapweed. The honey tasted strongly of buckwheat, but was not very dark.


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## north of 56 (Apr 1, 2016)

Good morning, I just joined this forum yesterday and was looking around and noticed your request for information. We have grown Koto buckwheat for a few years now in northern British Columbia Canada with great success. We grow several types of cereal crops in small quantities for our own use such wheat as bread making, oats for oatmeal, durum for pasta etc etc. We have (2) acres in total for this and only need a fraction of that so we grow Koto buckwheat as a green manure crop but now let it mature and let the bees feed on it and they really like buckwheat. It grows about 4 feet tall and flowers from June until frost which in our part of the world is mid September - mid October some years. We do things quite differently because we will not use pesticides therefore we mechanically weed everything so we grow all our crops as row crops so I can cultivate whenever the need exists. Buckwheat does a great job of choking out weeds all on its own so it could easily be planted conventionally in narrow rows because it grows so fast it gets a good jump on weeds in a normal year, in fact where I am from they used to grow buckwheat for weed control before the chemical invasion that is standard agricultural practice now. Because I grow row crops I seed heavier than normal to maintain about 80% of a standard per acre plant population which I think for buckwheat is 24 plants per square foot. Koto is a good choice as it is an open pollinated variety. I plant Koto the same as cereal in that I plant to moisture with about 1/2 to 3/4 inch soil cover as it germinates quickly and grows very fast. Not sure if any of this information is helpful and you need anything further let me know.

North of 56.


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