Oh, No, Not Knotweed!

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Weed control, management, ecology, and minutia

Posted by: Gale Perez

Published on: February 1, 2021

Thanks to our friend at Cornell (Lynn Sosnoskie) for sharing the article,"Oh, No, Not Knotweed!" by Henry Grabar from the Pocket Worthy website.

Oh, No, Not Knotweed!

“If it’s growing close to your house, there’s a potential it could send its rhizomes and break through your foundation,” says Jatinder Aulakh, an assistant weed scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. Photo from Japanese Knotweed Solutions, Ltd.

It's been over four years since I bought hypodermic needles at a CVS, squatted in my backyard, and drew them full of glyphosate. I'd done my best to build a little garden in Brooklyn, only to see the ground begin to vanish beneath the fastest-growing plant I had ever seen. It sprouted in April with a pair of tiny, beet-red leaves between the flagstones, and poked up like asparagus through the mulch. By May the leaves were flat and green and bigger than my hands, and the stems as round as a silver dollar. My neighbor's yard provided a preview of what was coming my way: a grove as thick as a cornfield, 10 feet high, from the windows to the lot line. I had to kill the knotweed.

I tried a few different approaches: Yanking it out stalk by stalk was a sweaty, summer-long game of whack-a-mole—a thankless full-time job. Then a friend and I spent one long night digging a 10-by-4-foot trench, lining it with black contractor bags, and refilling it with dirt. It looked like we were trying to bury something, and in a way we were: the knotweed rhizomes—the plant's creeping rootstalks—under our feet, searching for a ray of light.

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Focus Area Tags: Pest Management, Yard & Garden

Tags: knotweed (2)

Comments: 2

Comments:

by Stephen Sanguinetti

on February 2, 2021 at 8:59 AM

Now I know the background for Day of the Triffids movie.
LOL

by Sonja Lewis

on February 2, 2021 at 10:05 AM

Sounds like this is Reynoutria japonica? The title should've said "JAPANESE knotweed", because most of us are know only of the short, nuisance annual knotweed, Polygonum aviculare. In NW Idaho and E Washington, There are severe neighborhood tensions over the Reynoutria--beloved by its cantankerous originators, and hated by those it has invaded. It's been taking over upland stream banks, too. In Asia, it's leaves are harvested as a vegetable, sometimes with a Nigari treatment, whose magnesium MIGHT help bind the high oxalate content. (Wikipedia)A case of "Eat thy enemy?" Its honey is also valued, and medicinal effects are being researched. Now that I'm in NW Calif, my problem is a Golden Bamboo grove started by former owner, with horrifying rhizomes.