Appropriate mechanical sowing depth and soil-covering thickness improving seedling quality of tartary buckwheat

In order to investigate the feasibility of mechanized seeding technology and the measures of improving the mechanical sowing quality of tartary buckwheat in the hilly areas, a field experiment with three sowing depth (2, 4, 6 cm) and soil-covering (no-covering as CK) was conducted to study quality of tartary buckwheat seedlings during the growing season of 2012 at the farm of Jintang county in Sichuan Province. The results showed that sowing depth was the most important factor, and the optimum depth was 4 cm. The emergence rate, seedling number, seedling rate, root activity, stem diameter, dry matter, area per plant and leaf chlorophyll content of the treatment of 2 cm sowing depth decreased significantly (p