Knotweed fight expands after July floodwaters

“It’s just rewarding seeing the difference in the landscape and how you can now see the water from the turnout. People love to come and fish there, and they’re going to be able to have a much cleaner, neater area,” Kopper said.

She recognized that she’s made just a small dent, that clearing all the knotweed from the area will amount to little on its own, but with some patience and volunteer assistance, she’s optimistic about what she might accomplish next year.

Kopper was inculcated with knotweed-fighting know-how by Hyde Park’s resident mitigation evangelist Mary Walz, who helps head up the Knot in Hyde Park organization and helped Kopper’s daughter tackle a patch on her property in that town.

Knot in Hyde Park just wrapped up its third season and spent a busy summer battling back the tenacious invader. Major projects included an experiment with using goats as knotweed mitigators, managing a Cricket Hill patch with the assistance of Lamoille Union High School students and science teacher Chris Witlock, recruiting volunteers to help a local farmer pick sprouting rhizomes after the July flood covered a hay field with displaced knotweed, and obtaining approval from the state to treat some infested areas with the herbicide glyphosate.

Through it all, Walz has continued an outreach and correspondence campaign with individuals and conservation organizations in Vermont towns. She’s also taken time to speak with the conservation commissions in Cambridge and Stowe, along with other advocates.

The gospel of knotweed mitigation even reached a visitor from Lake George, N.Y., who was biking the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail through Hyde Park and saw Knot in Hyde Park’s signs explaining the removal process, and she returned home interested in the subject.

“There have been quite a few people who have called from other towns, mainly individuals calling, people in Eden and Waterbury have called,” Walz said. “That’s terrific, because they have a problem, and they’re trying to solve it.”

Through it all, Walz has stuck with her message: removing the knotweed early goes a long way, and short bursts of management over a sustained period can make a big difference. Her preferred method of management is careful removal of the entire plant and drying it in piles on wood pallets to keep the plant from continuing to spread after it has been pulled.

Renewed efforts

Walz’s advocacy is contagious and can cause a social change reaction. Kopper, who was inspired by Walz, pushed her local conservation commission in Cambridge to renew the knotweed fight they’ve been waging in various forms since at least 2012.

This prompted commission member Sara Lourie to undertake an update of a 2013 survey she had made of knotweed in the town.

“It was shocking to see how much it had spread — both in area, and in density — in the last 10 years,” she said.

The commission proceeded to enlist the help of volunteers to pull knotweed near the Route 15 bridge, after which they made knotweed and blueberry jam with their remnants, and at the Brewster River Gorge, where they stacked their cullings in the kinds of drying piles advocated by Walz.

Lourie echoed Walz’s call for vigilance in the wake of the flood, where she noticed it had been thinned in some areas around the Lamoille River because it likely washed downstream.

“It can regrow from a fragment less than an inch long — a piece of root, or a node of stem — and once it establishes itself, it can be extremely difficult to remove,” Lourie said.

New frontiers

While some towns have seen an increased level of knotweed vigilance, both Stowe and Morristown may be future targets for increased organizing.

“It’s a big issue in Stowe, it’s increasingly an issue in Morristown,” Walz said. “We’ve talked about trying to encourage our most immediate neighbor this winter to try and do a bit more.”

In Stowe, the conservation commission has focused mostly on education, hosting the forum with Walz and others while connecting interested individuals with resources to conduct individual efforts.

Apart from a tarp suppression effort at Sunset Park, there is little in the way of an organized management plan of knotweed in Stowe, which has grown rampant along the recreation path and the banks of the Little River.

“Some members of the community are really concerned about it, but so far, there isn’t a management strategy for that big of a problem,” said Sarah McShane, Stowe’s planning and zoning director who also supports the commission.

A project involving Hyde Park’s Zack Woods Herb Farm, run by farmers Jeff Carpenter and his wife, Melanie Carpenter, a state representative, would see an excavating of the rhizomes of knotweed at Stowe’s Mayo Farm to turn into a medicinal project, has long been in the works but yet to be executed, as the farmers, dealing with the fallout from the July floods, decided not to disturb the riverbed this year.

Along with growing community efforts against knotweed, Walz would also like to see more state action, with preferably a greater effort on the part of the Agency of Transportation to mitigate the spread of knotweed, as ditching and other road projects are often responsible for the continued spread of the plant.

For those who may look at the more more dense thicket of knotweed and see a problem that’s intractable, she has a simple message.

“Everybody’s lives are busy, but it doesn’t take that much time,” Walz said. “If you just pick one site and look after it, it really will make a lot of difference.”