Daily Improvisations

  • Inside the Homestead
    • Sewing
    • crochet and knit
    • Playing House
    • In the Workshop
    • Cooking and Food
    • Helpless Female
  • Out in the Garden
    • In My Greenhouse
    • Gardening in Southwest Idaho
    • Straw Bale Garden Project
  • Out with Animals
    • Chickens
    • Goats
    • Horses
  • Around the Globe
    • Adventures with Wild Greg
    • Chocolate Shops Around the World
    • Life in Taipei
    • About Town
      • My Blogs
  • The DI Store
    • DI Gardener’s Shop
    • How to Build a Backyard Brick Oven From Scratch (Book)
    • Custom designs
  • DI Memberships
    • Log In
    • Sign up to be a DI Sewing Room Insider
    • Dream House Members Area
      • Dream House Eyewitness Login
      • Your Account
      • Dream House Project
    • Become a Dream House Eyewitness!

My Backyard Weeds – Wild Buckwheat Poses as Bindweed

June 8, 2018 by Laura Blodgett Leave a Comment

Fairly boring wild buckwheat

When is bindweed not bindweed? When it’s wild buckwheat! When wild buckwheat is vining up through your desirable plants, it is fairly mature and can look a lot like bindweed. However, take heart, there are some crucial differences.

For one thing, wild buckwheat is MUCH easier to pull up by the roots than bindweed. Of course, how easily it comes up will depend some on the soil, but there is no network of roots. The wild buckwheat plants that I pulled in my yard had much more fibrous and normal root structure than bindweed. Even in a fairly dry area, the whole plant came right up.

Wild buckwheat is included in the Polygonum species. This Greek name refers to the many (poly) swollen stem nodes that look like knees (gonium). If you look along where each stem grows out from the main vine, it will probably look a bit bulbous. Like many weeds, it has several common names, such as climbing knotweed, black bindweed, and corn bindweed.

Give me a wild buckwheat seedling any day!

The wild buckwheat leaves are much more spade or arrow like than bindweed. But the easiest way to tell the difference is the flowers. Wild buckwheat flowers are barely noticeable. The one drawback to this is that they can be flowering and forming seeds quite under the radar.

This is inconvenient, but since wild buckwheat is an annual (as opposed to the perennial bindweed), it will die in the winter. When the seeds do sprout, the first leaves are long ovals. The true spade shaped leaves appear quickly, though, making the weed pretty easy to see. AND the seedlings are super easy to pull.

There are flowers in various places along this wild buckwheat vine, if you look closely.
There are flowers in various places along this wild buckwheat vine, if you look closely.

Tips on getting rid of wild buckwheat

Apparently wild buckwheat is somewhat resistant to glyphosate based weed poisons. They have been from the start, so they are not some monster weed that has developed. In my experience, the best control method for them is some combination of pulling and mulching. The seedlings seem to succumb to mulch very easily.

Just like with any weed, wild buckwheat can choke out other plants by using up available water and nutrients. It is so light weight, it is hard to imagine it physically overpowering anything. There was one study that mentioned sugar beets having reduced sugar content if wild buckwheat was allowed to continue growing in the field.

Is there anything outright good about wild buckwheat?

Another way that wild buckwheat is nicely boring is that it is edible, although lacking much nutrition or taste. This means I don’t have to worry so much about it in animal pens or with small children around. I was particularly researching it because I have had this somewhat similar looking vining plant in the same area and it is known to be toxic: Bittersweet Nightshade.

Some herbalists say that wild buckwheat can be used to combat sore throats or digestive issues. I couldn’t find much more information than that. This one website that I finally found that talks about ‘wild buckwheat’ and it’s herbal uses also identifies it in the same species as true buckwheat, which none of the weed identification books or websites did, so the author may be talking about a different plant all together.

So there you have it. A weed with a name that sounds like it could be a rodeo bronco is about as innocuous as they come. Wild buckwheat may be boring, but sometimes that is just what a gardener needs in a weed.

If you want a good book for weed identification in the northwest United States, I recommend:

 

 

Filed Under: Gardening in Southwest Idaho, Out in the Garden Tagged With: backyard weeds, southwest Idaho gardening

If you want to read a heartwarming story about how a mother deals with a daughter's death, read this book.

If you have ever wanted to cook pizza in a brick oven in your own backyard, this book is for you!

Basic Facts Guides to Gardening in Southwest Idaho

a list of blog articles covering the basics to help you with your garden in southwest Idaho

My Other Blogs

  • Fun Fitness After 50
  • Fun Learning Chinese
  • LauraBlodgett.com
  • The Happy Homeschool

Blogroll

  • Anemone Flynn
  • Fine Gardening
  • Gourmet In The Field
  • Sew 4 Home

About me

 

 

Daily Improvisations is a project by Laura Blodgett

If you want to know more about what I’m up to and where to read about it, here is a summary!

Making sure you know that:

Some of the links on this site are affiliate links, including affiliate links to amazon.com. See disclosures here.

Contact Me

Contact Me
First

All pictures and content including the name and logo “Daily Improvisations” are Copyright (c) 2019 by Laura Blodgett, unless otherwise noted. Please contact the author with any questions or comments.

Tags

animals Backyard Oven backyard weeds book reviews Chef Betharoni chickens Cori Lou Costa Rica crochet and knit decorating even I can do dehydrating fabric stores around the world flowers flowers from seed Gardens Around the Globe helpless female homestead injuries insects interview Maui music organizing poems PVC Pipe Projects questioning the establishment recipes restaurant reviews sew sewing southwest Idaho gardening sprinklers stock market diaries Taipei Taiwan technology know-how The Best Little Chocolate Shops tools and equipment underground house unimpeded parenting Wild Greg Adventure

Copyright © 2023 · Beautiful Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in