Bamboozled

 


I planted some tiny specimens of fargesia rufa clumping bamboo along our fenceline back in 2013 and then I let it grow-- unchecked-- until it grew much larger and more jungly than the photo above; I really enjoyed this dense evergreen foliage, even though it was making our backyard smaller and smaller-- and my wife allowed it because she knew how much pleasure I derived from looking out at this thick dense bamboo jungle, for various reasons:

1) it was aesthetically pleasing

2) it obscured the view of our neighbor's house 

3 and the bamboo remained bright green in the middle of winter . . . 

but apparently, you are NOT supposed to let clumping bamboo grow in this fashion, as the rootball can get so dense that the bamboo can strangle itself-- you're supposed to cull the "weeping" culms and clear out the dead branches between the healthy upright culms-- so I've got some serious work to do, I trimmed some of the bushy stuff this morning, but I'm going to have to get down on my hands and knees and really weed out a lot of dead shoots and clean out the leaves (and soccer balls and dog toys-- I found a few of those in there) to allow air circulation and healthier sprouts . . . here's where I am now in this project, but I probably won't really get in there and trim everything until fall, when it gets colder and I won't get eaten alive by mosquitoes.

1 comment:

  1. It would be cooler if this sentence was about BambĂș. The town next to mine cracked down on bamboo, it's highly regulated now because it spreads like a weed and pisses off neighbors.

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