Since we’ve just come off the best time to get rid of it, for our inauguration, I’d like to ask, you know what plant sucks? Japanese knotweed sucks. We’re talking Fallopia japonica, aka Polygonum cuspidatum. It’s a big component of a whole tableau of invasive species that have infested our roadsides here in Massachusetts. Et tu, Rachel Carson?

You know who else sucks? Its big bro, giant knotweed, Fallopia sachalinensis. Together, sure, they're a big threat to native plants. What I bet you DIDN’T know sucks is the fact the two have hybridized to birth a true demon spawn of a knotweed. The Voltron of knotweeds, if you will. (Except evil.) The Mighty Morphin Knotweed. What will they take out next?

Fortunately, there is something you can do for knotweed besides drown it with soul-sucking chemicals. You can eat it. Apparently it tastes just lovely in all kinds of dishes, and here are a few from the kind folks at the New England Wildflower Society.

What about after the “wild rhubarb” stage NEWFS talks about? Lord knows the stuff’s gonna keep growing. Well, I’ll tell you. The best time to knock out knotweed is late in the growing season, when it’s blooming. If you can stand it, let the plant get big enough to bloom, THEN chop it to the ground and/or spray with an organic herbicide like Burnout and/or chant while dancing in a circle, naked, swinging a sharpened spear of the plant. At that point in the season, knotweed will be putting all its sucky plant energy into flowering, and will be MOST unhappy you disturbed it. But beware, if you dig it, they will come. Any fragment of root left will produce a new plant.

Don't forget to dispose of your cuttings in a way that’s sure to see them disposed of, e.g. leave them out in the sun to desiccate first. Roots and shoots may produce new plants where soil is moist, and the spread of invasive plants is just one more unpleasant effect of stormwater runoff.

Last but not least, odds are you won’t find those two knotweeds at your local garden center, but don’t think you’re off the hook if you’re growing this little beauty instead of the mothership!

That would be Fallopia japonica ‘Variegata,’ a variegated cultivar of our invasive friend. It and other knotweed cultivars set seed and sends out runners just like their unvariegated parents, and many will revert back to their natural state. (Pure evil.)

You could grow better.