Bamboo - fresh cut - for trellises and gardening projects

[applestar]

I went and cut some bamboo to use in the garden. They were maybe 1.5 to 2 inches in diameter at the base and 18-20 feet tall. I cut the lower half into 8 feet sections and tied them in bundles to load on the roof of my SUV. It was a lot of work to get them loaded but my DD's helped, and they thought it was all a great fun.

I intend to cut off the side branches and trim down the upper sections to remove the weakest top portion, and trim them further into "twigs" for mulch and thin bamboo for supporting peas and for the tomatoes when first planted, and the upper poles will be used as tomato stakes. The thicker, lower section stakes will hopefully support an overhead trellis that need to be replaced in the VG beds -- originally made from purchased 7/8" bamboo stakes, they lasted three years, but is falling apart after holding up the cucumbers and the luffah last year.

Looking around the internet, it seems that the bamboo stakes need to be cured and by fire looks to be the way to go, so I think I'll see if my patio fire pit can be dragged out and readied for use. This will give me the chance to burn some of the iffier fruit tree prunings and make some hardwood ash for the garden as potassium source and bug/pest repellant.

Does anyone have experience working with fresh cut bamboo for projects? I need all the help I can get.

[applestar]

They are tied up against the clubhouse right now to keep them more or less straight... and resting on pavers to keep off the ground....

[imafan26]

Uncured bamboo gets infested with post hole beetles, dry and become brittle in a few months.
We usually don't fire them unless it is for decorative purposes but we do soak them in resin to preserve them longer.

[Gary350]

I tried bamboo once for bean poles and tomato stakes. It is so slippery pole beans will not climb up bamboo. I could not keep tomato plants from sliding down the poles.

[applestar]

Hmm... don't want to use resin. This is something to think about -- it confirms my suspicion that not all "natural" materials are necessarily safe. I've noticed strong-smelling finishes on some bamboo. I wonder if we have those post hole beetles here....?

Gary, I use bamboo poles for Florida weave stakes. Two poles about 6 inches apart, secured at the top with a zip tie. Cotton and other garden twines will securely tie on after double wrapping and passing the twine through the loops. The smoothness of the bamboo allows you to yank the twine on tight -- I noticed I can't do that with square wooden tomato stakes.

Fwiw -- in the past I bought First cut? First grade? Bamboo stakes by the bundle from am leonards. Volume discount and the bundle would last me about 3 years. They are stronger and more durable than wooden stakes which sometimes snap from stress whereas the bamboo would flex. Need twice the caliper wooden stakes for the same job.

Just happened to get these fresh cut ones so I wanted to see what I can do with them.

[!potatoes!]

we've used fresh bamboo as stakes in the orchard to hold (or raise) tree-guards. if they were in good shape to start with, we usually get about 2 years out of them in our area, untreated/unheated.

[Taiji]

Maybe you could make some flutes out of the thicker ends?!
I love bamboo as a quickly replaceable crop.

What else can you eat; make furniture with; make flooring with; build houses with; and make clothing with. I actually have a shirt and a set of long underwear made of bamboo.

[imafan26]

My friend makes walking sticks, bamboo beehives for the carpenter bees, pencil and wall holders, The larger bamboo culms can be cut into bracelets. Other uses are fishing poles, poles for flying koi on Boys day, plant stakes, bamboo trellises (cross tied with raffia or nylon string or even wire. And of course Kado Matsu for the New Year.

[applestar]

Thank you for all your tips!

As a related topic, my mom called last night in a semi-panic ... the bamboo sent out an incursion runner into her yard and there are (were) shoots PAST the viburnum, PAST the old cherry, almost to the dogwood! Well, that didn't sound likely (I thought) -- that would be good 25 feet from the edge of the last bamboo.... I promised her I would stop by.

...and I did, this morning, but she was absolutely correct! There were cute little dimples by the dogwood tree where my Mom had apparently dug up a couple of the bamboo shoots... and a marching line of up to 2 ft tall shoots all the way back to the main clump. HA! I got to work with the garden fork, a little hoe and a hatchet I brought along.

My mom and I shared the harvest and I prepped my take like this. Some of the prepared (boiled with brown rice) shoots are pictured below. I'm going to process the peeled skin (in the bucket) separately -- hoping to make them into food wrappers and also make some traditional May 5 Children's Day treat with these. You can see I tried making some green bamboo drinking cups and tubes.


...OF COURSE I had to make sure sake wouldn't leak out of the cup...
...DD is drinking apple juice out of hers

[applestar]

So, yesterday, really just for fun, I tried drinking room temp sake in one of these freshly cut soft green bamboo cups. I sipped it rather than tossing it down, and towards the bottom of that first cup, I started to detect the faint aroma of the bamboo that began to transfer to the sake and probably also the fragrance in the "nose" that had been drawn out by the alcohol.

It was TOTALLY intriguing. I'm not a drinker by habit, so I like to enjoy my little treats when I do have them, but at the same time, I don't normally drink that many, even in little cups like this -- it's just about the right size for a sake cup -- a little bigger than a shotglass, a little smaller than a double-shot.



So it was unusual that I went on to try some more -- 2nd cup was more fully infused, and my little nightcap was wonderful with the undefinable bamboo aroma and flavor, too. It's a funny sort of fragrance... it feels like something I should recognize... maybe grass or hay? A field in the summer heat? Wicker? I don't know. For me, something nostalgic.

And look at those little split bamboo pieces -- couldn't you totally see wasabi served in them? A little bigger and you could use them for soysauce or salsa. At the overgrown bamboo shoot stage, these are soft enough to cut with a kitchen knife.

In Japan, they use green big timber bamboo rounds -- about the size of rice and miso soup bowls as summer cold somen noodle serving "bowl" The bamboo at my Mom's won't get that big, but what a fabulous use -- those big ones could be split into long serving trays and bowls, too.

...I also found this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQv3bPBs8FY

[ID jit]

You may want to look into various methods and materials used to stabilize wood. Bamboo is tek-nickle-lee a grass, but the cell structure is basically the same. Dry bamboo and dry wood are basically a whole lot of cellulose fibers around a sort-of-3D-brick stack of empty spaces.

Stabilizing fills those empty spaces with a stabilizing agent. The agent is usually an oil, but can be other things. General idea is if you keep the ambient oxygen off the cellulose fibers, it can't degrade via oxidation and the oils also repel insects and microbes.

Have seen 2,000 - 2,500 year old knife handles of a very tight grained oak which had been stabilized in what we would call flax oil today. They still had mass and heft to them and felt like well oil wood. These were artifacts off a site I was on in '88 in SW France. which had sent most of their lives in the ground it a rather dry region.

Have oil stabilized wild rose arrow shafts, atlatls, atlatl darts, spear hafts, staves, walking sticks and the like in PVC pipes spray painted black to speed up the process with solar heat. Same process can be used with fiberglass resin, denatured alcohol and a slow set hardener, but it is messy as hell and unpleasently aromatic. (You can wash basic raw linseed oil down to flax oil rather easily, but it takes months and a lot of dedication. If you want details let me know.)

[applestar]

Processing them in pvc tubes sounds like a great idea. I'd love to hear more details.

[ID jit]

PVC pipe a little bigger in diameter and maybe a foot longer than what are going to stabilize. Glue on an end cap on one end and the screw type cap /plug and fitting to the other end.

Spray paint it black (krylon fussion sticks very well)

secure the pip upright against something where it is going to get maximum sunlight. Put the stick(s) in the pipe and fill the pipe with stabilizing oil of choice to the point where you can push the stick(s) down with 2 or 3 inches of oil over the tops of them. Cut a short length of a smaller diameter pvc pipe or similar to hold the sticks under the oil when you screw the top cap on. Anything will work as a spacer so long as it is hollow and won't absorb the oil and keeps the sticks submerged.

You will want a foot or so of airspace above the oil to absorb the oil as it expands and heats up. As the oil expands, the air gets compressed and increases the pressure which helps force the warm oil into all the voids in the cellulose structure.

When you check it, it the sticks don't float up any more, they are stabilized. I always gave them another week or more for large things staves and walking sticks and a couple of extra days for arrow shafts.

You will have to let them drip dry for week or so, and this will just get you surface dry to the touch.

Did a test when I was making knife handles. Red oak stabilized in raw linseed oil washed 3 times was still mostly oil on the inside. only the outer 1/8" of the handle was dry, but no oil leaked out once the surface dried up.

Going with fiberglass resin, alcohol and slow set hardener, you have to use metal pipe and heat with a heat source do to the setup time of the resin. Not the smartest thing to due. Flamable semi liquid in a pipe building pressure as it is heated.

Just dunking the bamboo into glass resin and letting it sit for half the set up time and then drip drying for the other haft of the set up time should get you a good impervious finish on everything it touches. If there are bugs in it, then you sort of made fossils.

Have been meaning to to a sets of row sticks for years with 1/2" oak dowels but never have had the time to follow through with it.


2

[ID jit]

If you want to try a small experiment. Get a microwave and heat safe jar or glass measuring cup, a small piece of DRY wood, and some oil. Cooking oil would work for the experiment, but the glycerides will interfere a little bit and cause problems later. Baby oil or mineral oil would work.
[NOTE: Wet wood zapped in a microwave produces steam which isn't going to mix so well with the hot oil, and will make a mess of your microwave.]

Put enough oil in the jar so the small piece of wood has room to sink. Zap it in the microwave you 15 seconds or so and repeat zapping it until the oil starts to get hot. You should be able to see it swirl. Once you see it swirling, cut back to 5 second zaps. Keep repeating the 5 second zaps. eventually the small piece of wood will fizz like an alkaseltzer tablet and sink. Once it sink zap it again for 5 seconds until no more air bubbles come out. Let it sit and cool down in the oil. Once cool enough to handle, suspend the small piece of stabilized wood over the oil over nigh or so and let it drip dry. Next day, place it on a folded up brown paper bad and let it sit there until it is dry to the touch, If you want to wipe it down with paper towels or something, go ahead. Basically you just have to wait for it to dry. after a couple of weeks of drying, drop the stabilized wood into some water, let it soak, take it out of the water and wipe it off. (Water will bead and roll off the wood.)

Finishing oils like raw linseed (stay away from boiled because it has ugly additives to make it dry faster), tung oil, butcher block oil, etc all work well this method. Mineral oil never really dries but does work.

Note: "flax oil" is actually linseed oil refined to edible, originally via water washing.

[imafan26]

A machete works too. Killing bamboo is another thing. The runners will run under the mat and pop up all over the place. It is even resistant to Round Up, but so are a few other things like African Tulip, Fukien Tea, and most shiny leaves.

I have a lot of bad luck. I never burn the kadomatsu, so I have about 5 or 6 in the house now and I we are having another NY celebration with mochi making, and kadomatsu making on December 28. I do want to repaint a couple of my older ones since they have lost their color, but I do want to keep the tall ones. The smaller ones, I will probably just save the rope, since the rope is expensive for another year. I can recycle the bamboo into pencil holders and dry stem vases (if they are tall enough), I may even start a border fence with the rest. I can get more bamboo, cutting it is the hard part since it splits easily especially when the blade is dull.

I actually buy bamboo stakes to stake up orchids. I prefer wire and metal stakes (rebar, and cattle fence posts) to hold up heavier plants like tomatoes and vines in the garden.

[Gary350]

When we lived in the big house on the other side of town about 10 years ago I found a guy a few miles away that had 2 types of bamboo growing in his back yard. One size is about 7/8" diameter 15 ft long this if perfect size for fishing poles. The other size measures 1 3/4" diameter 25 ft long. I got several bamboo poles that he cut and threw on the street I tried to use them in the garden.

A few years later house was for sale owner said, dig up all the bamboo roots you want. Bamboo was impossible to dig up the soil was like 100s of rope size roots going in 100s of directions so I got an axe an chopped out 3 or 4 rhyzone roots of each size bamboo and planted them in a certain spot of my yard. I read the roots have been known to travel 50 feet under a highway and come up on the other side so my plan was to be able to till a circle around the plants once a month to stop roots trying to get out of the area. Nothing grew 2 summers in a row we sold the house and moved to a smaller house.

Fast forward. About 2 months ago my neighbor at the old house called to tell me neighbor across the street has a giant pile of cut bamboo 4 ft deep, 6 ft wide across the whole front yard 150 ft long piled next to the street for the city to pick up. I was surprised that bamboo grew so I drove past our old house to look. I should have taken my camera, there is still a forest of bamboo growing in the back yard. LOL. It looks like the new owner never tried to keep the bamboo under control it is so easy to mow new shoots down with the lawn mower.

We parked the vehicle in front of the house to look. Wow what a nightmare of bamboo 1/2 of the back yard is a solid forest of mixed bamboo growing right up to 3 property line fences. No bamboo in neighbors yard they must be mowing down new shoots with the lawn mower. The large size bamboo is growing 25 ft tall bamboo about 8" between each bamboo pole. The smaller size bamboo is growing in the spaces between the larger bamboo. It is such a tight growth of bamboo a small dog or cat would be a tight squeeze for them to get into the bamboo forest. LOL I am surprised the new owner let that bamboo take over the yard like that.

[imafan26]

You need a backhoe to dig out a bamboo grove.

[applestar]

Original concept material used at the STARDOME website was split bamboo —

Subject: NEW PROJECT - Star Dome structure

I mentioned in passing elsewhere that I want to build a STARDOME structure. I’ve been researching and drawing ideas from various sources, but they all seem to have been inspired by this site:

STARDOME, STARDOME, the most excellent bamboo dome.
https://www.stardome.jp/how-en.html
[...]

[gumbo2176]

I live close to the Mississippi River and it is chock full of willow trees between the levee and the river bank. Before I built my permanent trellis with treated wood and hog wire, I'd head out to the river with a machete and cut down dozens of small willow branches, strip them of their smaller limbs and use them tied up in a teepee fashion for beans and cucumbers to climb on.

[imafan26]

We used to make artificial beehives with bamboo. You need 3/8- 1/2 inch bamboo. One end sealed. A bundle is tied and then hung in a tree for carpenter bees. Alternatively, the bamboo can be put in cans or buckets with varying sizes of bamboo diameters and the bucket is placed on its side in a shady spot.

I remember my uncle used of send us packages with bamboo shoots we would have to peel, boil and bottle.

We used to make bamboo fishing poles out of the fresh canes.

It is true, if the bamboo is not cured properly it pretty much turns to dust. Literally, the post beetles get into the bamboo and turn it into dust. Bamboo will shrink as it loses water. If you want to keep bamboo as a novelty you can cut a culm of bamboo with a couple of intact nodes. As long as you water from the top and the lower node is intact, the bamboo will sprout at the node and it will grow for a while if you water inside the bamboo culm.

[Taiji]

I wonder if bamboo would grow here UPnorth. Is it possible to get a variety that doesn't take over the whole place?

[imafan26]

Clumping bamboo does not run but the clumps will get larger and expand over time. Most of the mini bamboo are runners. It snows in Japan and China so there must be some cold hardy bamboo that will tolerate at least a light frost. It is actually awesome to walk through a bamboo grove. The 80-100 ft bamboo towering above and a soft mat of leaves underfoot. When the wind blows gently, you can hear the leaves rustling and the bamboo creaking and bumping into each other.

One bamboo culm is very flexible and in a strong wind it will snap. However, when bamboo is bound together, it is very strong. After heavy storms when it floods in the garden up to 15 ft, and with winds up to 60 mph we can usually see the house on the other side of the garden where before we only saw the bamboo. It grows back in a few months.