Invasive Knotweed for Dessert

There's a local patch of very entrenched knotweed (an invasive species), and I decided to do my bit by cutting the expanding shoots when they were young, and eating them. I peeled and stewed them like rhubarb, and they made a delicious compote. Added to oatmeal; also mixed it with whipped cream for a great dessert. Tastes a lot like rhubarb. (Only pick from areas you know aren't sprayed with herbicides!)

A local abandoned lot is full of knotweed.

I removed the leaves and peeled the young stalks.

After stewing the stalks with some sugar and water, I added whipped cream and topped the dessert with some redbud flowers.

Is Plant Rescue One Answer?

It’s heartbreaking to do presentations about the importance and value of planting native plants and to know that people will leave the presentation excited but having an impossible time finding native woodland plants for sale at nurseries. These plants take such a long time to grow…they are precious beyond words.

At the same time, woodland sites are being destroyed left, right and centre for development, and the plants they harbour are bulldozed, treated like garbage.

While participating in a plant rescue this spring, all I could think was that somehow we need to fix this.

It simply must be a regular feature of the development process that plants are salvaged and distributed to public projects.

Hundreds of the delicate spring ephemeral toothwort, a native woodland plant that is rarely available at nurseries and yet that many gardeners would love to plant, would have been bulldozed if they hadn’t been rescued at this site.

I know that some people worry that something like this would encourage more habitat destruction. Folks, it’s already happening and the pace is relentless.

If a site can’t be saved, its plant bounty should be, at the very least.

I’m not sure where to start with this, or who else is working on a policy to fix this madness, but I feel a project brewing…

A drop in the bucket…

Terrible Grass and Weeds Bylaws: Kingston, Ontario

It wouldn’t survive a court challenge, and yet it remains on the books and continues to be enforced every growing season.

Kingston, Ontario’s grass and weeds bylaw is a particularly heinous example of the vague, arbitrary, outdated and anti-ecological “propert standards” bylaws that municipalities across Canada persist in using in ways that discourage habitat gardens and naturalization.

“Unsightly weeds”? Based on subjective aesthetics that the judge in the Sandy Bell court case ruled overly broad and unenforceable. At the very least, name the “weeds” that, for health and safety reasons, people aren’t allowed to grow. “Heavy undergrowth”? By what standard and when does a succesfully growing groundcover become undergrowth that’s too heavy? “Overgrown and unsightly” shrubs?! That’s a particular howler.

Ironically, the two groundcovers that the bylaw approves of to prevent soil erosion are two non-native species that are wreaking havoc in natural areas, and that some places in the U.S. have prohibited gardeners from planting because of the demonstrable ecological damage they do: ivy and periwinkle.

It’s way past time to weed out this bad bylaw, Kingston!

Urban Neglect as Opportunity

Cities are full of public spaces that are virtually abandoned, with no one tending to them, caring for them, giving them the love they deserve, taking advantage of the opportunities they offer.

This is the state of the public boulevard where I’ve planted the Sedges Instead beds. I seem to gravitate towards impossible sites!

The soil is basically compacted concrete, low in organic matter, and full of tenacious non-native plants that provide little in the way of habitat for pollinators and other beneficial insects.

The surrounding trees, non-native black locusts, spread like mad, sprouting up everywhere with their thorny protection.

I’m determined to demonstrate that this boulevard can be brought into some semblance of ecological health and community value! These places call out for tending.

At this site, I am planting native sedges, along with other flowering native plants, with the hope of inspiring others to tend neglected public spaces.