Buckwheat, Takane Ruby

Rareseeds.com: A brilliant, ruby-red flowering superfood from Japan. Pink and red flowering buckwheat is a rare and wondrous pseudo-grain; blankets of pink can be seen blooming high in the Himalayas. In the late 1980s, Akio Ujihara, a professor emeritus from Shinshu University in Japan, collected seeds for a unique flowering buckwheat from Yunnan, China, at about 12,000 feet elevation. The professor selected and perfected this variety, and the signature red blanketed fields can now be found in Nara Prefecture, Japan. Japanese farmers quickly embraced this as a stunning cover crop, much more beautiful than white buckwheat. Tourism in the area to see the pink and red buckwheat fields has skyrocketed. The seeds are ground into a flour for soba noodles and can also be sprouted for a highly nutritious microgreen. In Japan, buckwheat is also brewed into tea and made into cookies. Honey from bees who fed on ruby buckwheat was analyzed by Shinshu University and shown to contain 100 times the antioxidant effect of regular honey.