It depends on what you want. Buckwheat is often used as a weed suppressant. It's quite brittle.

For use with a growing crop, you could just knock it down with a roller (or a herd of children) and let it lie there, shading the soil and forming a mat against weeds.

If your soil is healthy, that may be more of an advantage than incorporating the green material. If you till it in, it's going to take a few weeks to break down in the soil.

It would be an interesting experiment to do it half and half, and see which the melons respond to most.

Sue

Thank you for your response. I am just looking to help build the soil. I am not expecting it to help that crop of melons neccesarily, maybe just helping with weed control and helping build the soil for the next year. Last year I planted some annual rye grass and the soil in that part of the garden seemed "looser" although that was a very subjective observation. I am just pondering about having something growing whenever there is open ground and using a variety of crops (buckwheat, tillage radish, annual rygrass, winter wheat, winter rye...)

"Does anyone have any thoughts if this is a good plan."

It's a good plan, pretty much what I do with melons. If you knock the b'wheat down just before or as it flowers it breaks down quickly- if turned under it will be gone in a few days, and I've never had alleopathic trouble from it.
For mulch I let it almost seed, the stalks cover better and last longer. It tends to thin as vines run so I usually cover with hay, straw, etc. By the time the last melon gets pulled the b'wheat is gone, unless you let it set seed.

An article in the Aug/Sept 2011 issue of Organic Gardening magazine talks about rolling a cover crop down, rather then cutting it or tilling it in, so that material lays down as a mulch.

I once priced the rental of one of those handled rolling things that you fill with water to level and firm the soil, and they quoted me about $20 for 24 hrs.

I guess that's okay if you have quite a lot of area to cover, but if you've got some younger neighborhood kids (or relatives), just offer them a candy bar for knocking all the buckwheat down! But NOT unsupervised, or you may lose your melons, too!

Sue

On the softball field, we use an old piece of carpet dragged across the ground to help level it, I bet if you added a little weight to the end, you could drag it right over the buckwheat to flatten it.

Just a thought, of-course I am guessing this is not the back forty.

John � who has never grown buckwheat, but played a lot of softball.

Drag a tire or a 4x4 across the plot to flatten it.

I have an old piece of chain link fence that I got for free and I use it for smoothing soil, like a drag harrow. I plan to use it to knock down my crimson clover next spring instead of bush hogging. The bush hog scattered it too much.