To those parents who wish to teach their children well, I say: urge them to look to the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps. There they can "slay and spray thousands of knotweed," say Maddie and Josh. "They can get purpled," says Kailey. (She's referring to the purple dye we add to our herbicide solution, which helps us track where we've been.) They'll also learn the lessons of hard work (we get started each day at 8 am), respect for others (there's no such thing as a bad idea in this crew), and environmental stewardship. That's what I've learned about the five-person VYCC crew who's helping BCCD (the county conservation district) control Japanese knotweed.
We're working on Tidds Brook in Sandgate, the historic source of the species in the Green River watershed. As the story goes, sometime in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, the owner of the Spring House on Southeast Corners Road (an especially avid gardener) brought to her grounds a gorgeous plant. It grew very fast, had beautiful red-tinged stems and deep green leaves, burst forth in clouds of white flowers late in the growing season, and turned myriad reds and yellows and oranges in autumn.
Did I say it grew very fast?
Did I mention it's on the Vermont Noxious Weed List?
And with reason. Japanese knotweed is one of the gravest threats to aquatic diversity in the Northeast. It prefers disturbed sites, such as those along streams and rivers. Though it lacks desirable features typical of our native riparian species – fibrous root systems which help them cling to riverbanks in flood stage, viable seeds dispersed by birds – it has one enormous advantage over willows and red osiers and others. A piece of rhizome the size of one's thumb, when broken off in high water, can root and send up a new plant downstream. The effects of such colonization include loss of the native plants our river critters depend upon, streambank instability and erosion, and the sedimentation of brown and brook trout spawning gravels. To control Japanese knotweed is to give the gift of life to fishes.
And we are doing our best to control it on Tidds Brook. We start by cutting the larger stems. They're bundled and carried up to the road's edge. Another crew member follows with a bottle containing a solution of Rodeo™, an herbicide registered for use along streams, with a little dye added. The wee-est bit of the purple solution is sprayed into the cut stem. Stems too small to be treated with the "cut and drip" method are sprayed with a very dilute solution of the herbicide. (All these activities take place, as by law, under the supervision of a certified pesticide applicator.) The patch is fully treated when Charlie Pike and Ed Pike from the Sandgate road crew come by, we fill their dump trucks, and they transports the stems to a stockpiling site in a neighbor's gravel pit.
Neighbors are critical to the effort. Seven landowners have given us grateful permission to treat Japanese knotweed on their properties. They are what we hope is the first phalanx in an army of landowners stretching all the way down Tidds to the Green River, and from there to the Batten Kill. (Maybe someday every Batten Kill landowner will join us.) The crew asks me to thank all those landowners for making this project possible. And requests that I thank too the Town of Sandgate and its road crew.
For my part, with this column I'd like to give a public shout out to the crew – Sage, Kailey, Maddie, Josh, and Sunil – for their over the top exertions on behalf of the Green River and Batten Kill watersheds. They spend some time while together exploring what might be their short and long term goals. With their gifts, I know they'll pluck one goal after another from the trees they'll wander through in the years ahead. They've very much helped BCCD move toward our goal of healthy plant and animal communities in the wild and working landscapes of Bennington County.
Shelly Stiles is the district manager of the Bennington County Conservation District, whose mission is promoting rural livelihoods and protecting natural resources in southwestern Vermont.
This column appeared in the Bennington Banner in September 2009, as one of the BCCD's Conservation Currents pieces, a bi-weekly feature written by BCCD board and staff members since August 2006.