As I was driving along today between Rochester and Dover, I noticed many thick stands of Japanese knotweed beside the road. The plants are at the perfect stage for eating just now (early May) in New Hampshire. If I had time to stop, I could have harvested bushels of the stuff. I'm not a big fan of the taste when eaten raw although many are, but adding a sweet component to the sour knotweed in something like a knotweed-strawberry pie makes it quite good.
Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica or Polygonum cuspidatum) is a very common invasive plant in New England and throughout the United States. At first glance it looks something like bamboo, and is sometimes even called American bamboo even though it is not a member of the bamboo family. It grows very rapidly during the spring and summer, then dies off in winter. The roots survive, however, and even a small root fragment can produce a new plant.
Japanese Knotweed is often found along roadsides because of the way in which it propagates. Snow plows here in New England often catch a bit of the roadside dirt, including knotweed root fragments and push them further on down the road. In the spring these travelled roots produce plants in the new location, and eventually spread to form a new stand or thicket of knotweed.
Japanese knotweed is actually being harvested and used commercially now. If you look on the ingredients of a bottle of the health supplement resveratrol, you'll see that the reseveratrol is most likely extracted from Japanese knotweed.
The young shoots of Japanese knotweed can be eaten. They have a sour taste, not unlike rhubarb. That's because they contain some of the same chemical make-up as rhubarb. Those with a sensitivity to rhubarb should therefore avoid knotweed as well.
Anyway, the point of all this is that because Japanese knotweed is a virulent invasive species, it is one of the wild edibles that you can harvest with wild abandon. If you pull up all the available shoots from any given patch, that's ok with knotweed, but definitely not ok with native wild edible plants. Even though you are not likely to get all the roots to eradicate the knotweed patch, you'll still be slowing down its spread at the very least.
When knotweed gets larger it is more fibrous and woody like real bamboo. So it must be harvested young to be eaten. They are good up until they get about two feet tall, just peel off the thin stringy layer on the outside and chop off the leaves at the top. You can cook them up as a substitute for rhubarb in most recipes or eat them raw.
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Japanese knotweed
Photo by KENPEI
Creative Commons Attribution, S-A 3.0
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Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica or Polygonum cuspidatum) is a very common invasive plant in New England and throughout the United States. At first glance it looks something like bamboo, and is sometimes even called American bamboo even though it is not a member of the bamboo family. It grows very rapidly during the spring and summer, then dies off in winter. The roots survive, however, and even a small root fragment can produce a new plant.
Japanese Knotweed is often found along roadsides because of the way in which it propagates. Snow plows here in New England often catch a bit of the roadside dirt, including knotweed root fragments and push them further on down the road. In the spring these travelled roots produce plants in the new location, and eventually spread to form a new stand or thicket of knotweed.
Japanese knotweed is actually being harvested and used commercially now. If you look on the ingredients of a bottle of the health supplement resveratrol, you'll see that the reseveratrol is most likely extracted from Japanese knotweed.
The young shoots of Japanese knotweed can be eaten. They have a sour taste, not unlike rhubarb. That's because they contain some of the same chemical make-up as rhubarb. Those with a sensitivity to rhubarb should therefore avoid knotweed as well.
Anyway, the point of all this is that because Japanese knotweed is a virulent invasive species, it is one of the wild edibles that you can harvest with wild abandon. If you pull up all the available shoots from any given patch, that's ok with knotweed, but definitely not ok with native wild edible plants. Even though you are not likely to get all the roots to eradicate the knotweed patch, you'll still be slowing down its spread at the very least.
When knotweed gets larger it is more fibrous and woody like real bamboo. So it must be harvested young to be eaten. They are good up until they get about two feet tall, just peel off the thin stringy layer on the outside and chop off the leaves at the top. You can cook them up as a substitute for rhubarb in most recipes or eat them raw.
That's not all, there's quite a few dedicated knotweed recipes, including japanese knotweed wine! Just be caseful with the clippings, in the UK it's illegal to cause knotweed to grow anywhere, so dropping any clippings which may help it spread could get you in trouble, more so if you drop it near your house!
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