GardenTrip

The GardenTrip has bamboo and she likes it a lot. This isn't news to those of you who read this blog, since she's posted about her bamboo control methods in the past. What is news is that, sadly, the GardenTrip needs to get rid of her bamboo - soon.

It's become abundantly clear that this particular strain of running bamboo is stronger, sneakier and much quicker than we gave it credit for, or can keep on top of.


About three weeks ago, I did the tri-annual exploration of the sand barrier with an old pruning saw. I found a lot of runners and roots heading south through the barrier and beyond, as far as three feet from the mother plant.

Lots of the roots were deep, too.
This surprised me, because the sand was supposed to offer so little resistance that the bamboo would stay shallow if it traveled.


I filled this big pot with roots. I was concerned that the bamboo had managed to penetrate so far beyond the barrier in the months since my last cleanup.

About a week prior to my cleanup, I had thinned the bamboo substantially, to encourage the growth of fresh, thick canes.


Be careful what you wish for, GardenTrip: lots of fat, juicy bamboo sprouts are coming your way.


This area doesn't seem quite so threatening, but look what we discovered yesterday:

This bamboo shoot is coming up a foot past the end of the sand barrier. It's at least two feet north of the mother plant.


Considering I just cleared the sand trap three weeks ago, this looks bad.

In our last garden, the Mulch Man controlled the bamboo nicely with a twice-a-year thinning.  Maybe it's all the rain we've had, or maybe it's a different strain of bamboo, but it is acting way too happy.

The Mulchers will get some help removing it, but the first question is: what can adequately replace the bamboo in this narrow, partly-shady spot? As good as some people's containers of bamboo look, that's not a good solution for this area. The replacement needs to provide the same evergreen privacy screening, yet contend with the neighbor's pin oak on the other side of the fence. One idea is Nandina domestica.





Heavenly Bamboo has an evergreen, bamboo-like quality, hence its  common name. Summer blossoms turn into nice red berries in fall and winter.


And the new growth is a pretty reddish-green. However Nandina will take years to get tall enough for much privacy, at least compared to the bamboo.

Since our front garden already has a area planted in Nandina, I'd prefer a visually different solution. But it's a definite contender.

The Mulchers are open to other suggestions, so if you have an ideal candidate, please share here!

Longview Ranch has a strangely-shaped backyard: there are two larger areas north and south, with a narrow bottleneck in the center back. This center space is the view through a bay of three windows in the sunny breakfast room where we spend a lot of daylight hours.

Also immediately visible is our eastside neighbor's driveway and house with windows looking directly at our windows. We needed green privacy everywhere in our backyard, but we especially wanted it as quickly as possible there. The solution? Bamboo.

Below is a shot of the backyard area in original condition except the plastic vanes have been removed from the lovely chain link fence. Note the neighbor's teenage pin oak, another factor we need to consider as we garden this area.

The future bamboo planting area in spring 2008.

Above, the fence is painted black - looks better already, right?


A shot of the grass removal in spring 2008. It was so much fun to see how quickly the transformations occurred from this point on.

In our last garden, we had bamboo with no barrier. For years, we worked intensively to keep it under control. This time, we were going to be smart and save ourselves lots of future work: we would have an approved bamboo barrier installed by the landscape crew.


The soil has been added and incorporated into the beds.

Oops, a communication problem with the crew: the bamboo barrier was supposed to be installed before the soil was added. This will mean a lot of extra digging.


These two photos are reversed: below, the barrier is being installed in the three-foot-deep trench dug to hold it. Above, the trench is being backfilled after the barrier is in place.


The finished installation. We started out with the bamboo in a row resulting in minimum visual excitement but maximum privacy coverage.

Late summer 2008. The bamboo just took off - those plants were happy!

Then we went to the Hardy Plant Society's fall sale. We spent some time there talking to a very knowledgeable bamboo grower, who convinced the Mulch Man that the bamboo barrier was not a long-term solution to containing bamboo. He advocated for using a trench system.

The concept is to dig an 18" deep trench at least a foot wide, then fill it with sand or another soft material. Several times a year, you run a tool through the sand to find any shoots that are growing through the sand and you cut them. Apparently, because the bamboo is not encountering the resistance of the barrier, it will stay shallow and easy to locate in the sand. The existing barrier needs to be cut away down to 16-18", so the sand is directly in contact with the soil.

So that's what we did.
Above and below, you can see the sand installed in the trench around the bamboo planting bed.

We moved one plant forward as part of this second phase, since the bamboo was growing so robustly and we already had great coverage.

The jury's out on this method. I'm looking forward to being able to report positively in the future. But I hope that even if it's not the perfect solution, we will at least have bought ourselves a few years of lower maintenance.

As my dear old dad would say "On vera."