First Visit to Bamboo Garden Nursery
2006.04.26
I’ve taken most of this week off, after working some overtime, and plan to work on installing the bamboo barrier. Running bamboo, like most grasses, grows by sending out rhizomes underground. Once a year, new culms grow up from these rhizomes. To keep the rhizomes from spreading out in all directions, some type of barrier is necessary. In addition, some periodic maintenance is required to cut off rhizomes which are trying to grow over or along the barrier.
Bamboo Garden sells a barrier made of 60 mil HDPE. It is 30 inches tall, requiring a 28-inch trench for installation. This depth hopefully prevents the rhizomes from spreading underneath the barrier and escaping.
Today I went out to the nursery to have a look at some of the bamboo options, and pick up some of the barrier material. Even on a Wednesday afternoon, they were quite busy, and I had to wait a while before someone could help me. In the meantime, I wandered around near the office, where they have some groves of various types of bamboo. Further down a gravel road is the greenhouse, as well as outdoor areas where they store most of their stock in containers.
The nursery is owned by Ned, an older guy who has been involved in growing bamboo in one way or another for many years. Also helping customers are some people around my age; a couple with a baby, and another girl. Oh yes, and two dogs, Oggie and Foxy. Ned ended up being my guide, and we took a golf cart down to the greenhouse area to look at some options. He’s a really nice guy, but easily distracted, so I found it somewhat difficult to keep him on track with the questions I was asking.
There are two main options I am considering. One is Phyllostachys aurea, known as Golden Bamboo or Fishpole Bamboo. It can reach 30 feet in height, but in the Northwest the maximum is typically 15 to 20 feet. Sometimes at the base of the culms there are a series of distorted nodes called “tortoise shell”.
The other option is Phyllostachys aureosulcata, Yellow Groove Bamboo. It is more likely to reach 30 feet than the Golden. Sometimes the culms have abrupt kinks near the bottom.
I think I prefer the Yellow Groove, mainly because I like the kinks, and the color patterning is more interesting. As the name implies, there is a vertical yellow stripe on an otherwise green culm. They have some other variants which reverse this, or have multiple color strips.
After touring around the greenhouse area, we headed back up to the office to take a look at the barrier material. At this point, Ned went to take care of another customer and the two young women helped me out with buying the barrier.
They sell the barrier by the linear foot, or you can buy an entire roll. I told them I needed about 100 feet of barrier, so we decided to go with a roll, which is about 130 feet. The roll weighs around 100 pounds, but with the help of a 2-inch diameter bamboo pole, two of us were able to tip it onto the back seat of my car without much difficulty.
Nate came by later on this afternoon and helped me get the barrier roll out of the car.
Below are some photos I took of other bamboo varieties there at the nursery. These first two are of Moso, the timber bamboo that in ideal conditions can grow as high as 80 feet. You can see some new culms coming out of the ground. The new shoots have a protective sheath, mostly brown in this case.
Another interesting type is the Black Bamboo.
Bamboo Screen