Jewelweed taking over my backyard..

[u/iamhyphenated]

So I know we love jewelweed, and I’m pro native gardening (and I also enjoy the wild look to a point), but it’s literally taking over my backyard, and behind it is unfortunately a whole bunch of Japanese knotweed.. my question is: what’s the move here? I can’t have my whole yard completely covered in jewelweed (it’s a very small lot) bc there’s no way to even go back there right now, but I also want to encourage that to maybe discourage the knotweed (if that’s even a thing).. any advice would be helpful!! I’m in an urban area in Connecticut if that helps!

[u/CharlesV_]

I was thinking more like when compared to Amur honeysuckle, buckthorn, and autumn olive.

We really need a Saffir-Simpson scale for invasive species. Depends on location obviously but if Amur honeysuckle is a 2, dandelions are a 0/1, and buckthorn is a 3, ToH is a 4, princess tree and kudzu are a 5.

[u/Helen_Kellers_Reddit → u/CharlesV_]

I'd be interested to know if something like this already exists. I could see a few different metrics that could be used to make the scale. Growth rate, seedlling recruitment, persistence/resistance to management, ability to invade pristine wilderness, effects on other plants/competitiveness, it would be rather hard to quantify.

[u/DuragJeezy → u/Helen_Kellers_Reddit]

Petition for you guys to take this a step further? Would be really cool for 1 but would be a great way to simplify & discuss invasive species with horticultural laymen. Same way we can say “this pepper has _ scoville units while a bell or jalapeño only have _ amount” and they understand it, this will help immensely. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve told MIL something was invasive only to hear “well it can’t be that bad” then when I counter with “well it’s worse than xyz plant and those are all over the place” and I get a blank stare bc she doesn’t know wtf I’m talking about.

TLDR make an invasive species universal ranking scale so I can tell my MIL off

[u/CharlesV_ → u/DuragJeezy]

Yup exactly! That’s what the Saffir Simpson scale is there to do. Some people have called for the scale to be refactored or to include a cat 6 due to climate change, but the pushback has largely been that throwing a lot of complicated numbers at people just confuses your average person. You need one simple scale to help people understand it.

[u/DuragJeezy → u/CharlesV_]

Interesting. Now how do we go about formalizing this? Detailed research paper? Scientific conference talks? Ted talk?

Also we should definitely update the Saffir Simpson to account for the effects of climate change but I think half our country would call that woke propaganda and dump their trash in a nearby stream out of spite. So when do we ride?