Improvising poison

I had been at war with the Japanese knotweed on the riverbank since the beginning. And not with much success! After some research I decided to inject it with Roundup. It seems to be the only poison that works, and if you inject it, you do not affect anything other than the plant itself. And Rose, the previous owner of the house, had left me some. So I got active with that for a few years until I realised it was past its sell-by date, and not very effective anymore. Then I bought a new tub.

In the meantime, the neighbour had got impatient and had just sprayed Roundup on the riverbank. Not very kind to the river, but there wasn't much knotweed appearing the next spring! But more than none. And I decided I needed to act on that. It would be great if we could exterminate it!

I checked my poison injector and realised it didn't work. That had happened before! Then I had asked the neighbour to fix it. He's got skin in the game too. But I felt embarrassed to ask again. I have no idea how to fix that thing myself! And I decided to go the simple way. Just drill a hole in the stems, and use a little funnel to get the poison in.

I had recently bought some gimlets, and these would do the job. And the nozzle of a resin gun can function as a small funnel. I only had two stems to deal with! So it wasn't a big job.

I really hope this helped! I am not normally hostile to vegetation, but there clearly are exceptions. And the knotweed is exception number one…

Improvised measures

The knotweed I was attacking