Planting Bamboo
2006.07.29
After lunch, Nate and I returned to my place to start planting the bamboo. We started with the largest one, approximately in the middle. We tried to line it up to mostly block the view from my kitchen window to the second-floor apartment window, but didn’t get it quite right. Oh well, close enough.
We had to dig down a little for this big one. Then we watered the hole, pulled the container off, and roughed up the roots with a hand cultivator.
While Nate held the bamboo upright in place, I shoveled in topsoil around the base until it would stand on its own. When we had the first bamboo planted, I posed next to it, while Nate amused himself to no end taking photos from various angles. Below is the one I find least embarrassing. Hey, it’s my website.
The next bamboo plant we started working with was root-bound. We spent a while untangling the rhizomes which had circled around and around in the container. Then when we planted it, Nate pulled them out as straight as he could and held them down with his foot until I could get enough topsoil over them to hold them in place. We had to adjust them a couple times even after that, to try to keep them running down the middle and not over towards an edge next to the barrier.
The next few were ok, so we just roughed up the roots a little and chugged along. There was one more that was root-bound though, so we had to spend some time untangling things again. At one point, the rhizomes reached up and tried to choke Nate!
We got the last one planted, and Nate took off around 3:30. Before he left, we tried to get some photos of a little damselfly in my flowerbed. My digital camera doesn’t excel at macro photography, but this one shot turned out ok (full disclosure: I did crop it to about half the original extent).
I continued filling in between the bamboo plants with topsoil, compost, and the clay dirt that had been removed to dig the trench. The topsoil and compost were left over from the corner planting bed project last fall. After bringing everything up to approximately the same level, I tossed out some slow-release organic fertilizer. After watering that in, I spread out a fairly loose layer of compost as a mulch. Then I laid out a soaker hose in a long loop around the bamboo plants. I used some bricks to help hold it down, as it had a tendency to turn sideways and spray out on the driveway or on the fence.
After that it was cleanup time, while I let the soaker hose run for a while. I wrapped up around 6:30 this evening. Still some excavated clay soil left over, not sure what I’ll do with that, although I need to fill around the outside of the barrier in some places. I used the rest of the topsoil pile, and made a pretty good dent in the compost pile. Starting to see parts of my driveway that have been buried for at least a couple months, up to almost a year.
I forgot to get a shot from the kitchen window, I’ll try to do that tomorrow morning before I head down to the office to work on a deadline. Anyway, yay bamboo! Hope it makes some visible progress next spring, but it will probably be a couple years before it really takes off and fills in.
2006.07.30
I think I may need to get some stakes out there to help prop up some of the bamboo, as they tend to lean, especially when the wind blows.
Transporting Bamboo