Part 1: Constant vigilance.
Source: harrypotter.fandomcom
This is a true story.
I have bamboo growing at the edge of my yard. It’s an extension of my neighbor’s stand of bamboo. I like the neighbors, so I tolerate the bamboo.
Each spring, I stomp down all the new shoots. Each summer, I harvest the ones I missed. After swinging a machete for a few hours, I ended up with a nice pile of corms (stalks), shown below. I’ll find uses for those as (e.g.) stakes for my plants, and similar. In fact, I used some of an earlier harvest to build my garden beds in the first place (Post G05, Wordless Workshop).
Given that my neighbor appears to like bamboo, I have resigned myself to the fact that eternal vigilance is the price of bamboo freedom. If I ignore the bamboo for a couple of years, it will surely take over that corner of my yard.
But after one of my bamboo harvests, I heard my neighbor express some discontent about his stand of bamboo. So I casually suggested that if he wanted to get rid of his bamboo, I’d be happy to cut down his bamboo, same as I do mine.
His response? “My bamboo? I thought that was your bamboo.”
We both then blamed the owner of the lot behind ours, whose bamboo stand adjoins ours. Surely it must be her bamboo that started this mess.
Then, this spring, she had all of hers cut down. Apparently, she’s no great fan of bamboo either.
The likely explanation is that this bamboo grove has outlived all of its previous owners. Or, perhaps more properly, all of its co-resident humans. Some primordial homeowner planted it and moved on. The bamboo abides, the humans don’t. No pre-bamboo property owner survives.
Now it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Every year.
Part 2: Bamboo is not the worst weed in my yard.
Bamboo gets a bad rap for being an invasive plant. Which it most assuredly is. If you ignore bamboo, it will take over your yard.
But guess what. This is Virginia. Any untended piece of land will do its damnedest to return to forest. As a result, my little suburban yard manages to attract a truly impressive array of invasive weeds and trash trees every year.
Admittedly, my yard is not the neatest in the world. I go for a naturalistic look around the edges. But this year, just off the top of my head, in addition to your garden-variety weeds (e.g., dandelions, plantain, wild garlic), of the things I can identify, I have cut down:
- Japanese stilt grass
- bitter cress
- nutsedge
- crabgrass
- wild violet
- chickweed
- purple dead nettle
- pokeberry
- damnit vine (cat briar)
- ivy, both English and poison
- winter creeper (Euonymus)
- false wild strawberry
- porcelainberry/fox grape
- morning glory
- Virginia creeper
- Venezuelan beaver weed
- sweet autumn clematis
- wild cane fruits (e.g., blackberry, wineberry);
- seedlings of:
- mulberry,
- pin cherry,
- holly,
- pawpaw,
- oak,
- maple.
And bamboo.
Of those, the trees and tree-sized weeds are the easiest to deal with. (Tree-size includes not just bamboo, but also pokeberry — just let one go and see what happens.) Those are big, discrete one-and-done weeds. They can’t hide, and once you cut one down, you’re done with that one for the year.
By contrast, the little stuff is endless. The vines, and grasses, and whatnot. Cut them back, toss organic weed killers on, hit them with flames. It doesn’t matter. They’ll be back, if not there, they somewhere nearby. It’s a summer-long game of weed whack-a-mole.
Part 3: At least it’s somewhat useful.
Bamboo is the only weed I deal with that’s even the least bit useful to me. The corms (poles) don’t last very long if untreated, but they are plenty good enough for staking up plants, trellises for vegetables, and the like. I have bamboo-based trellises all over my garden.
For that matter, I built my raised-bed garden using bamboo poles, as shown in Post G05, Wordless Workshop. Those temporary garden beds are still going strong in their third season of use.
This year, I’m trying out a second use of bamboo: Bamboo as a natural weed killer. Bamboo leaves are definitely toxic to some plants. Years ago I managed to kill a few plants by mulching them with bamboo leaves, before I figured that out.
You may have already noticed that almost nothing grows at ground level in a bamboo grove. That’s a pretty good indication that bamboo is an allelopathic plant. That said, you really have to look to find a credible reference who will say that outright.
Many bamboo species produce allelopathic compounds (natural herbicides), which prevent other plant species from living in the understory of a bamboo thicket)
Source: “W220 Bamboo (phyllostachys spp.),” The University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service, 09-0206 W220, https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_agexgard/87
For this year’s bamboo harvest, I’m covering a weed-filled stretch of driveway with bamboo branches and leaves. Those are waste products from my annual bamboo pole harvest. My hope is that the toxins in the bamboo leaves will leach into the cracks in the pavement and kill the weeds growing there. And that those toxins are persistent enough to keep those weeds from re-sprouting.
I’ll document that, and let you know what happens.
Part 4: Everybody hates bamboo.
Try Googling “bamboo” and “weed killer”. As yet, I can’t find even one internet source that suggests using bamboo as a weed killer. Instead, the first N-hundred pages returned by Google search are about killing bamboo with weed killer.
So maybe this idea of using bamboo to suppress weeds is a new idea. Or maybe it’s a dumb idea. Not excluding the possibility that it’s both.
But maybe I just can’t find it because bamboo is so universally hated. If anyone has successfully used bamboo as a weed killer, any write up of that has been pushed so far down the findings that I don’t have the patience to locate it.
Part 5: Why? Feeling attracted to the dark side.
As I was finishing this year’s bamboo harvest, my adult son walked up and asked me what I was doing. Breathing hard and pouring sweat, I pointed to the mound of bamboo branches in the driveway and I said, “I’m cutting down the bamboo in the yard”.
He thought about that for a second and said, “Why”?
I was about to launch into the traditional explanation. It’s an invasive plant, and if you don’t control it, it will take over as much land as you give it. In this case, if I don’t cut it down, it will take over the narrow area between my garage and the lot lines. I would no longer be able to walk behind my garage.
Plus, everybody hates bamboo. It’s just the way it is. It cannot be questioned.
Instead, I paused. I’d spent a few sweaty hours every day that week dealing with various invasive plants. Using everything from a weed-whacker to an axe to go after them, as listed above. Fully realizing that most would re-sprout the moment I turned my back on them.
This is Virginia. Something obnoxious is going to grow in that area. What would I lose if I simply surrendered the land behind my garage to bamboo?
And thus began the seduction of the dark side of bamboo. Before this, I had always wondered what kind of idiot purposefully planted bamboo. Now I was testing out that slippery slope myself. I mean, how bad could it be if I just let the bamboo do its thing?
At least I’d get a nice neat weed monoculture. That would replace the riot of vines and trash trees that grows up every year, and needs to get cut back several times a year. Once established, I would no longer have to weed within the area covered by bamboo grove. It would take care of itself. I would only have to keep it from spreading. Which, duly noted, isn’t really that hard. Knock down the soft shoots in the spring, cut the ones you missed in the fall.
As a bonus, I’d have usable bamboo poles whenever I needed them. And, possibly, I’d get a pretty good natural weed killer, depending on how this year’s driveway experiment turns out.
Plus, like Adam and Eve, the original sinners are long gone. It’s not like I planted it. And it’s not like my next-door-neighbor is going to get rid of his. So it’s not as if I bear some huge guilt for introducing it, or even for failing to eradicate it.
I realize bamboo is otherwise useless. Around here, no wildlife will eat it. Not even the deer, which is saying something, as they eat damn near everything else. Environmentally, it’s a little patch of sterility. It’s not really any more useful than my driveway. It just looks nicer.
So ….
Yeah, I’m considering it.
In any case, I’m done for this year. I’ve cut down all the bamboo in the yard, and won’t have to deal with it again until next spring.
Old habits die hard, as do deep-seated prejudices. So I haven’t committed to the bamboo dark arts yet. But next year, I might just let my long-gone neighbor’s bamboo grow.
It was here before I got here. In all likelihood, it will be here after I’m gone. Maybe fighting it in-between is not the smartest use of my time.
