Frequently Asked Questions

• The Bamboos (Bambusoidaea) consists of 1439 different species in 116 genera. It is one of the 12 subfamilies of the grass family (Poaceae) and the only one to diversify in forests. Bamboo is a great plant for individuals concern with a green environment.
• Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on this planet. It has been recorded growing at an amazing 47.6 inches in a 24 hour period.
• Bamboo is a crucial element in the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  A grove of bamboo release 35% more oxygen than an equivalent stand of trees. Because of this, planting bamboo is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint and help fight global warming.
• Bamboo is a viable replacement for wood. It can be harvest in 3-5 years versus 10-20 for most softwoods. It can out yield pine 6 to 1 in biomass production. It is also one of the strongest building materials with a tensile strength of 28,000 psi. To help give you an idea how much this is, mild steel measures 23,000 psi.
• It is a great soil conservation tool. It greatly reduces erosion with a sum of stem flow rate and canopy intercept of 25%. This dramatically reduces rain run-off, preventing massive soil erosion and making it very earth friendly.
• Bamboo can be eaten (new shoots), made into fiber for clothing, it can be used in concrete reinforcement, in can provide great livestock feed with the foliage being up to 22% protein, it can be machined into numerous forms of lumber, etc. It might be easier to compile a list of what bamboo cannot be used for than what it is used for.
• Bamboo can also tolerate extreme conditions that most plants cannot. It was actually the first plant to re-green after the atomic blast in Hiroshima in 1945.

This is a popular bamboo plant FAQ. The answer depends on whether you want them too!  Running bamboo types (Monopodial) are good spreaders because they send out runners every year a good distance from the parent plant.

Clumping bamboo types (Sympodial) however, do not spread so far so quickly as they stay in a clump and the new bamboo shoots generally pop up only a few inches away from the main plant every year.

Your choice will depend on whether you want the bamboo to spread or would rather keep it contained in one area of your garden or land.

Survival of the bamboo will depend on the local environmental conditions. If the conditions are favourable a grove can be maintained indefinitely and be consistent in production of new culms yearly. An individual culm will generally live between seven and ten years but by the time it begins to die off it has produced new culms to take its place.

Yes bamboo is relatively easy to grow. This is a plant that does not require pesticides, it will grow without fertilizers but will do better with them, and on the whole they do not need a huge amount of water. Bamboo is very popular, and being evergreen can make fantastic hedging, windbreaks, privacy screens, and landscape garden features.

Yes. Bamboo canes will not grow any taller once they are topped, so it is a once-a-year process of cutting the younger canes after they leaf out. Cut the cane just above the node. Because bamboo cannot regain the lost height, it will get bushier in response to the pruning. Just be sure to leave some branches on the cane, otherwise the individual cane will die back to ground level .

No. Animals will often chew on it, but the leaves are actually rather nutritious and totally non-toxic (which is why, if you have horses, goats, cows, or sheep, you can use bamboo for a nutritious winter forage crop).

Lucky Bamboo (growing in water and rocks), which isn’t a bamboo at all but a member of the lily family, IS toxic to pets and should be kept out of their reach.

Most bamboo doesn’t like the dry air indoor environments provide; still, some will grow fairly well.  Otherwise, some form of humidity is needed to make bamboo happy. Keep a misting bottle handy and spray the bamboo daily.

Bamboo roots are thin and fibrous (think big grass roots) and can go down 2-3 feet. The rhizomes, which is the part that actually spreads, usually stay fairly shallow, less than 12 inches. This makes them easy to locate and prune if done on an annual basis.

No. We’ve seen bamboo come up through freshly poured asphalt, where the rhizomes attached to a mature grove were not removed during site preparation. Concrete and asphalt often have a layer beneath them that is relatively soft, sometimes even sand is used to level the site, and the rhizomes can scoot along it. Most often though, especially for the smaller species, asphalt and concrete driveways are too dense for bamboo to penetrate. Dry, compact gravel roads are nearly impossible for bamboo to spread into.