Off the Urban Grid

How to Grow Bamboo for Privacy, Utility, and Food

Did you know bamboo plants have more uses for more people than any other group of plants in the world?

You can find quite a few articles on “how to grow bamboo,” so we’ll keep that short and also go into the reasons you’d want to grow a stand of bamboo in your yard to start with. “Bamboos are evergreen woody stemmed perennial grasses.”

Because they’re actually grasses (and not trees as some folks think), they grow quickly.

A lot of people try bamboo just because it’s fast growing, making it a prime choice for creating a natural “privacy screen” between you and your neighbors, but there are other reasons to consider growing this plant as well.  It has a great utility range, and the list of bamboo uses below just touches on all the things that can be created from the stuff.

Uses for Bamboo

• Eating! — Here at “Off the Urban Grid,” we’re always looking for ways to lower our grocery bills by growing some of our own munchies, and many types of bamboo shoots are just fine for eating.  It’s a low-calorie source for potassium.  In China, they even make beer from bamboo.
• Building structures — Why spend hundreds of dollars buying fancy schmancy garden trellises and supports for your plants, when you can simply hack down some of your proliferate (and it is proliferate, oh yes) bamboo to use in various structural capacities?  You can build everything from simple garden trellises to fences to bridges for your water garden to gazebos with the stuff.
• Privacy screens – As mentioned, bamboo can be used to create privacy screens between you and whoever is peeping into your yard, since the fast-growing grass zooms up to a respectable height much more quickly than a tree.
• Clothing — Yes, you can make clothing out of bamboo fibers.  The process sounds a bit complex for the average homeowner, but you never know!
• Medicine — Bamboo is used in Chinese culture for treating infections (do you think that’s before or after they turn it into beer?).  In India, there’s a bamboo-based concentration (“bamboo manna”) that is said to be a tonic for respiratory diseases.

How to Grow Bamboo

Okay, let’s cover some bamboo basics now.  Instructions will vary a bit depending on the species you grow.  The following is for Phyllostachys bamboo, a hardy species that generally does well in USDA Zones 5-10.

“Make a trench between 1-1/2 and two feet deep for the Phyllostachys varieties; slightly shallower for shorter varieties. Tamp down the dirt at the bottom of the trench. Bamboo will always grow better in loose rather than compacted soil when given the choice. Fill in the trench with loose, rich soil, high in organic matter. The more nitrogen the better. Compost, leaves, sand, sawdust or even pure manure are all fine. Don’t tamp it down after planting as you would with a tree. Make the trench as wide as you would like the bamboo to spread. Three to six feet is a nice width for a backyard screen. While the plants can be planted right next to each other to shorten the time it takes your hedge to fill in; planting 6-8′ apart will still allow the grove to fill in within three to four years. You don’t need to make the trench straight. The bamboo will fill in whatever shape you make the trench. Be creative. Bamboo loves to be watered regularly and deeply. Eventually the falling leaves are self-mulching.”

Those instructions are from the Raintree Nursery website.  They ship many species of bamboo to most parts of the U.S., and they are based out of Washington State (the wet side!), so if you think of bamboo as only doing well in warm and sunny climates, well, you’d be wrong.

Warning

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the problem is often not “how to get bamboo to grow” but how to contain it. This stuff will spread if you don’t cut back the new shoots vigorously. If you want to keep good relations with your neighbors, I recommend you not plant bamboo next to the fence or at least get a special bamboo barrier lest your plants spread into their yard.

Tags: bamboo