Well, I guess you have to kick off a blog somewhere…so here goes. Last week, on one of those trips to the local dump, where I often come away with more rubbish than I take….I discovered some beautiful thick yellow bamboo poles in the garden refuse section.
rescued!
The vague idea that crossed my mind was that they might look attractive in the garden as a kind of art installation to visually stimulate the chooks into laying. Vague and kind of weird perhaps but once you’ve brought rubbish home, you kind of need to justify the decision. I’m still searching for the justification for taking the 3 battery-less Blackberries that I brought home the same day….might get $5 for those on eBay…great work James!
After a couple of days leaving the poles (or more correctly, culms) lying around and getting ready to return them to the dump, I noticed that shoots were growing out of the nodes.
pointy little shoot
Let me know if I’m getting carried away with the bamboo jargon…
Now I actually have 2 excellent books on bamboo out from the library at the moment – it was time to delve into them to see if propagating bamboo from these offcasts was a goer.
Actually only took a couple of minutes to identify the rescued bambusa, or bambusa vulgaris to be precise.
Good news is that it’s a clumper and highly regarded for its aesthetics (brilliant yellow with green striping) and easy to grow…beauty!!. Bad news is that it’s quite a starchy bamboo and not that good for turning to good permaculture use – making poles and er…well making poles.
the 3 amigos cut down to size
Anyway bamboo ain’t cheap and I wasn’t going to let that negative talk put me off so I did a bit more reading up. There seem to be a million ways to propagate bamboo and the quick and easiest seemed to involve cutting the culms into single sections and then burying them in propagating mix. I wasn’t going to muck around with all that – with no money outlaid, I thought, let’s just stick ‘em in the ground and see what happens. If they grow, they grow….
With 3 ½ acres, it’s not that hard to find a spare corner to stick another plant in….so I headed down to one of the swales which are still full of water from Brisbane’s monster month of rain. Planted one above the swale and the other two together on the low side.
planted out
I half buried them and will now wait to see if they take.
Well James … it’s now late July .. how is the bamboo growing, and the vetiver, and the broccol-eye experiment?
Well……bamboo is probably dead – so much for my impression that all you had to do, was take a section of bamboo, stick it in the ground and away you go. My next foray into bamboo will be to buy from a specialist retailer (rather than using dump off-casts) – I think Spring is a good time to plant so I should start looking into that now.
Vetiver is a happier story – most of the slips that I potted out have taken and I intend to plant them out in the near future. There is a drain running down the side of our drive that is getting badly eroded – I intend to use the vetiver there to reduce the damage.
Not much to tell regarding the broccoli – it’s easy to grow in Brisbane – too late to plant more now but next year, I will definitely grow more and try it from seed rather than nursery seedlings.