Christmas Number One

Well, today is not Just Another Winter’s Day – Japanese Knotweed Solutions has now successfully completed our revisits and processed all of our reporting, reviews and guarantee activations for 2025. It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, as we get to review our stats and successes from another successful swing around the sun – and shoehorn in some Christmas-cracker-joke level festive puns as a special gift.

And so, this is Christmas… another year over, and what have we done?

Wham! Since Last Christmas, we completed over 1,200 visits across just under 800 sites! This year, to save me from tears, we implemented a variety of improvements to our planning system and our proprietary automated revisit management platform, JK Connect, so there’s no Rage Against the Machine.

Hark, now, hear the angels sing – success rates remain at over 90% on our treatment plans. 40 sites (out of over 500 covered by guarantees) were given visits under the guarantee. 8 of these have since been signed off, and over half showed no growth this year (we continue to attend until the site has been signed off, with two years of monitoring to confirm there is no regrowth).

It’s a Wonderful Life protecting people’s homes and helping them to buy and sell… Over a hundred new IBG policies were activated across more than 50 sites this year and 39 IBG sites had their final scheduled visit, bringing peace of mind and goodwill to homeowners, safe in the knowledge that all through the house (and the garden), not a plant is stirring…

The Fairy Tale of New Work continued, too – with over 120 completely new projects starting this year as well as extensive new orders for works on similar numbers of existing projects. Hallelujah!

All this required travelling much more than 2,000 Miles – over 150,000, in fact! – but we continue to see small but significant reductions in our mileage year-on-year, in line with our carbon reduction strategy. This is partly driven by making an informed choice to Stay Another Day instead of Driving Home – we had over 200 hotel stays in 2025 – that’s a lot of carbon saved by having One More Sleep on the road, treating sites all across Great Britain.

All I Want For Christmas is the rest of our environmental permit approvals, which are coming in thick and fast after we applied for them last week. We had permissions for herbicide applications near water for nearly 200 sites in 2025 but we minimised spraying near water (and Underneath the Tree) as we want to protect the environment and preserve native vegetation so far as reasonably possible. We have reduced the number of permit applications for herbicide application near water to 145 for 2026 – a significant net loss, with only 18 new sites requiring permissions in 2025.

Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire? Not this year – it’s been over ten years since Japanese knotweed last burned any plant material on site. 17 Japanese knotweed site clearances took place in the Winter Wonderland at the beginning of 2025 and similar numbers are scheduled over the winter break this year, as well as extensive tree works.

I Wish It Could Be Christmas sunny Every Day – but while that’s problematic in terms of water and agriculture, it does mean better conditions for herbicide spray treatments. We observed very dry and consistently temperate conditions across the growing season. In previous years we have needed to rearrange visits due to snow, rain and other bad weather conditions (including where it was too hot to treat) but this year, partly due to the weather conditions but also through good planning, management and timely reactive measures, we reduced the number of repeat visits required from 36 extras in 2024 to 27 in 2025.

53 sites were reviewed due to access issues or other problems – the vast majority of these had (unlike Christmas) been cancelled by the client. A few more couldn’t proceed due to clients playing the Grinch and failing to provide Purchase Orders or other paperwork in good time or in one case forgetting the keys! Ten were reviewed by senior management and eight of these found areas for improvement, with measures either implemented or in the pipeline to prevent recurrence. This drive for continuous improvement is driving down problems, and has improved our rates on cancellations, lack of access and reduced the number of unresolved problems to two late attendances, one visit which couldn’t be completed due to lack of resources (which the client was informed of in advance), two admin errors resulting in a missed visit and one admin error resulting in incomplete treatment (representing 6 out of 1,200 visits – just 0.5% of total).

There were no projects remediating mistletoe, but we treated around 75% of our projects for Japanese knotweed infestations. There were surprisingly few new projects  for the other “big boys” – Himalayan balsam and Giant hogweed and only 3 sites with “New Kid on the Block”, bamboo – but strong representation from other species compared to previous years. In the twelve months of 2025, we started work remediating 13 different species (excluding trees and general weeds). 19 horsetail projects, 8 giant hogweed, 7* rhododendron, 6* montbretia… 5 gold rings! 4 calling birds, 3 French hens, 2 turtle doves and a partridge were found in a pear tree of heaven which meant that we had to wait until the end of nesting season.

Feliz Navidad and Merry Christmas, Everybody!

* some figures were revised for obvious reasons.