BUCKWHEAT The most interesting thing about buckwheat is that it is not wheat, nor even a grain or grass. It is the seed of a plant of the Smartweed Family. We all know this pink-flowered smartweed that grows in swampy ground, and the knot-grass that creeps around the back door. The dock, sorrel, and pieplant belong to the same family. Buck wheat is an annual with slender, branching stem two feet high, bearing white flowers and a three cornered, starchy "nut" in a brown hull.
Because the seed looks like a beech nut, the Old English "buck" (meaning beech), is combined with wheat, which originally meant white, in the name.
The triangular kernel is white and rich in starch, though deficient in other elements, and therefore lower in food value than the true grains. Yet it is grown extensively in many countries of Europe and Asia, ground into coarse meal, and made into porridge or cakes. The buckwheat cakes of
winter mornings in the northern states consume most of the crop raised in this country. Several millions of bushels are thus used annually to make our "flapjacks." The wild buckwheat grows on the banks of the Amur River in Manchuria, whence it was carried into Europe five hundred years ago. The peas ants of Russia raise five million acres of it each year. It has the advantage of hardiness, and ability to grow on very poor soil. Its season is short. Sowed after oats are harvested, it makes a crop, in some seasons. It is often put in as catch crop to plow under in the late fall. It ripens in the latitude of Sitka, Alaska, even.
Buckwheat hulls are sold as packing for bulbs and such things.