Yes, they are tasty. But it is a slow process separating the seeds from the pieces of pod, so it isn’t a solution that is easily scaled up.
Arrived here late: I recall reading that someone proposed mixing with (road, rather than table) salt to simply dehydrate them to a point where they can’t survive.
Not sure how effective that is, and you still have a residue to dispose of.
Maybe just collect cardboard and wood offcuts, and roast them.
Thus
producing a new var. of Salt-tolerant Balsam, ideal for Dune Stabilisation
The stuff of nightmares…
There’s tons of the stuff in our local woods… I don’t think that the landowner is interested. Someone said that Dexter cattle like eating the plants; but I don’t see that that is much of a solution as it means carrying the plants to a non-infected area (the only Dexters that I know of locally are about a mile from the woods).
You could always borrow a herd of goats as they are not too fussy about what they eat.
We did exactly that in Worcestershire in the 1980s. The first year, they didn’t seem to fancy it, and held out until they’d eaten everything else. They looked at their own front legs as an option, then finally did eat the balsam.
But, by then, there was a well-stocked seed-bank established, so that the stuff came back every spring.