1. What is the best way to get buckwheat or any seed through the thick thatch? Spray and wait till dead, then seed and drag with spike tooth harrow to work seeds down to soil?
2. If this works and the buckwheat takes off will it take care of the thick thatch so when later planting through the buckwheat the seed will easily contact soil and not sit on top of the thatch?
Any experience with buckwheat would be appreciated. Thanks
Hopefully, RIT will chime in here. He does a lot of no till plantings. One thing I would add on buckwheat is, if you don’t want it to come back volunteer, you will need to terminate it at the proper time, by spraying or rolling/crimping it, or another method somehow. It can be kind of invasive. It does a good job of suppressing other weeds, though.
Things to consider with Buckwheat - soil temp when planting and soil PH. After that I follow this order...
(1) Soil Sample. (2) Spray first. Let stuff die. Might have to spray twice over a couple weeks. Remember Glysophate takes 7 days or so to start to see results. Realistically you should kill off everything if it's not something desirable (only the first time you start T&M) - it's just my opinion. Once you get throw and mow going though you'll likely just mow the other stuff down when you're ready to plant something new (like brassica/turnips/etc. for fall) - this leaves the field always having a live root. (3) Seed. (4) drag. Sure you can use that harrow rake. I've tried teeth up and down. (5.) Fertilize/lime/etc. (6) For me this is a must! You need some type of soil compaction - even using your ATV tires to trample everything over will help get that seed to soil contact. (7.) pray for rain.
Regardless, I started out my planting a single seed and it was Buckwheat. I have since moved to more of a multi seed strategy. Buckwheat doesn't leave a lot of organic matter once it's dead so if you plant other things with it you will build better soil over time. It's a slow process.
Here's some of my "mono fields" (right/buckwheat being knocked down, top left/winter rye in the spring and bottom left is my fall planting day/I tried strips that year)
In the area that I had brassicas this year should I plant 2 crops of buckwheat so I can kill the first planting before it goes to seed or should I plant something else for a cover? Not sure what to do here.
Seeding rates depending on what you're planting. But using T&M you need to seed a little higher than if you were tilling. I think I seeded at a higher rate when I did only BW (like 100#/acre). BW likes a nice warm soil temp to really get going. Once mine was established, it topped out close to 4ft tall. The bees were incredible! The nicest side benefit with BW was that it grows quick and shades out weeds. That helps with the second planting.
If you're not going to test the soil in order to prep it prior to planting I would at least fertilize with 10-10-10 (it's a good general fertilizer) when you do throw your seed down. You can just grab some 20# bags at Home Depot. Lime is always a good thing (they sell Solu-Cal there, I think it's under a "Stay Green" logo and it's a better PH balancer - in my opinion, again sold in 20# bags at Home Depot).
As for what you plant, if you really want to do T&M (Throw and Mow), I would plant a mix of BW and clover as I said in my previous post (minimally). Then you don't have to spray to kill the BW, and your field won't be just dead debris. All you have to do is broadcast your next seed into the standing BW (ie. Brassica/Turnip/Rape/Winter Wheat combo). Then mow the BW down after you broadcast (and fertilize). By planting something with the BW like clover with the BW, once you mow, the clover will still be showing/growing which provides a continual food source. Clover also helps keep weeds at bay. The BW tops that you cut will degrade and provide a greenhouse and hold moisture for the next thing you plant that will come up through the clover - like brassica combo that I mentioned.
To be fair I should say that I don’t do TnM, simply because the hogs will eat anything on top of the ground if they can pick it up. I nuke, mow, and disc very lightly to plant my big seeds. It seems to work for me.
Here's a great doc on BW (even mentions no-till):
http://nmsp.cals.cornell.edu/publications/factsheets/factsheet50.pdf
Lime takes longer to react in the soil, so if you have bigger issues with the need to control the PH, you may be in a place like having to spread the lime out over multiple events. I had to put down 1500lbs and I had spread that out over the course of a year. That plan ended up being more about what I could fit into the bed of my truck along with the other stuff I was bringing. That resulted in 450lbs here, 150lbs here and so on. Overall, it worked but I still need to do more.
________________________ I still think you should plant something else in the BW that can tolerate mowing and feeding. Clover is cheap, you don't need a lot of it and it will nurse your other plantings (the deer will eat clover while the other stuff is starting to germinate).
Something else to consider, which may be hard to get a handle on now... When I started T&M, one of the more seasoned guys asked me this question and I really didn't understand it fully (I thought that I did):
What are your goals for planting?? And over time you'll learn and then re-ask yourself are they achievable. My goal, in my head was a beautiful green plot where I could shoot a great buck. I wanted to improve my land as a whole (I had my place logged and then I planted about 1,000 trees of varying fruit/nut/cover). I wanted my field to still be a food source for deer during the winter months. My problems in achieving this were/are many:
LOCATION - my field is in the bottom of the surrounding woods. It's a late night stop for deer. Typically they are NOT there in the daylight. They bed up high on the hillsides. So there wasn't much I can do there, no amount of hinge cutting and "bedding zones"/off-limits areas were going to change that.
SIZE OF MY PROPERTY - I do not have enough land to hold deer (hence my handle 35-acre). I ended up doing a lot of plantings in my field that resulted in my land becoming a "doe factory". Meaning, my winter wheat was super tall in the spring and does dropped their fawns in it. They then hung around all day/night during the spring/summer - anything that I plant gets mowed/eaten when there is plenty of other things in the woods for the deer to feed on.
PLOT SIZE - My field in kidney-shaped and is probably about 1.5 acres in total. It's the only field for miles. This means it gets really heavy grazing pressure from deer coming off the hillsides. Not much grows to maturity (well - the only thing is clover that I've fond). I've taken up planting horse feed (rolled oats) because it's cheap. The deer keep that and the clover mowed like a lawn mower.
RESULTS/WHAT I REALLY HAVE - My field is good during the early season until the oaks start to drop. Realistically that means that I have 3-4 weeks of my archery season to take a doe or if I'm lucky see a buck during daylight hours. Wind and access are a problem that I've had to contend with because of the number of deer coming into it. My field is on a slope, so thermals and wind direction make things dicey when hunting it. Deer used to come from above, now they come from all directions and even cross a road to get there (from below). So, trail cams on time of day and entry points have been important for me to be able to hunt it at all. It became hard to pick a stand location that would work against the many "noses" coming to feed. I never hunt the actual edge but 5-10 yards back into the cover of the field to prevent being seen but those noses are harder to beat!
Last year I was able to take a doe. It was my first kill off of my field after 4 or 5 years of work. Unfortunately, bears and coyotes (I have a trail cam pic of both in the same frame) got to it before I did. That was the first time I've ever had that happen and there was nothing left but head, hide and the bottom of 1 leg the next morning. If I had only known she made it 60 yards, I would have recovered her right away.
WHAT I'VE LEARNED
I started out the very first year with brassica. It was the best year I had! I had dropped lime/fertilizer/seed only in 2 spots (not the whole field) and dragged the heck out of it on my ATV! The result was awesome - turnips like baseballs and I was hooked! Looking back now, the deer didn't know the field was there as a food source, so things grew to maturity (and like the movie "Field of Dreams" I didn't know just how many would actually come to it). Now that I've seen first hand how much they can eat and how many actually showed up, I've changed my plan... I'm not going spend as much time worrying about the spring/summer/fall. I'm going try to keep clover growing. It handles browsing VERY well. I will continue to over-seed with horse oats periodically - especially mid-September prior to archery (also handles browsing VERY well) and no matter what I do, the deer will leave and go eat acorns. No matter what I plant (I even tried a plot-saver fence) They would be able to eat everything (all the brassica) out of my field in a matter of days, even if it grew to maturity. So I've found that they will come back and root through the snow for greens but it's less important than the other natural things (acorns/browse).
So as yourself: What are your goals really? Do you think that they are realistic/can be achieved?