Since temperatures have been around 70ºF (21ºC) for the last few days, I decided that it was time -- as early as it is -- to get the stream running again. I'm not going to show you that, as it involves lots of black, smelly water.
Most people who plant running bamboos don't realize the extent to which they spread in a single year in the right climate. Here in St. Louis the Phyllostachys species can send a rhizome 15' (4.5m) in one growing season, so rhizome pruning at least once a year is essential!
When you grow a lot of bamboo like I do (30+ varieties) and most of them are running bamboos, the rhizome pruning that I do to control them results in lots of rhizomes to pot up. Especially if I get lazy for a while and some of the plants shoot in areas that they shouldn't.
I have two things for you today. The first is a question relating to a plant I grow: Petasites japonicus. This is the large-leaved plant that I grow at the edge of the pond if you've forgotten. When it first starts to emerge in the spring, it first puts up its flowers.
Every year, regardless of how mild the winter was, all of my groundcover bamboos need to get mowed down. That's because they take varying amounts of damage ranging from minor spotting and tattering to complete leaf kill.
Yesterday I started talking about rhizome pruning, arguably the best way to control running bamboos.
I'm a little ahead of myself as spring is not actually here yet, but late winter is when I prune the rhizomes on my bamboos. This must be done at least once a year (better if I do it a second time in the fall though) in order to keep the bamboos from taking over the garden and my neighbors' yards.
When I was just out of college, a coworker of mine who was not from Chicago but had gone to school there for a few years noticed that I, like other Chicagoans he knew, often tacked the phrase "or no?" onto the end of questions. For example: "Did you watch the Bears' game yesterday, or no?"
Remember last year when I planted several running bamboos in the "hell strip" (aka "parkway" or "parking strip") in front of my house?
This past Sunday I had high hopes of tackling two projects related to this bamboo (Semiarundinaria fastuosa 'Viridis'):
On this blog I like to mix "pretty" posts with useful ones, sometimes even getting a post that is both. Unfortunately, today's isn't so pretty. If you grow bamboo though (or are thinking about growing it), it should be useful.
I've been thinking that I need to prune a couple of my roses soon -- the ones that the deer haven't already taken care of I mean, and the yews in front of the house need to be trimmed back a bit, but these aren't the pruning tasks that have been weighing on my mind lately.
A few things have caught my eye recently (when I've taken a break from digging and lifting and building). For instance, I really love this bamboo:
I've noticed some cool and interesting things in my garden over the past week. Some more obvious than others.
Spring is bamboo shooting season for most temperate bamboos, which means I'm checking my plants for new shoots every day, looking for the first signs of pointy pokings through the soil. I've been watching this one plant in particular, as it was one that I planted 18 months ago but didn't produce a single shoot last year.
Last weekend when I visited the garden of another bamboo grower and helped him in a start to get his Yellow Groove back under control, I mentioned that I was able to bring home several bamboo rhizomes and a few other plant divisions: the spoils of my bamboo rhizome conquest.
Yesterday I helped another local gardener with some bamboo control. When I started blogging two years ago searches on "St. Louis garden blogs" listed Ted Wight's real estate/gardening blog as the top result (and still does today), and looking through the gardening posts I found that Ted grows bamboo.
No, I haven't started my third year of posts with a drastic change from gardening to recipes -- it's time for some bamboo maintenance!
Not on me of course -- my pants are fitting fine thanks to all of this gardening -- on one of my bamboos. Well, I'm not really giving it more room. I'm actually just correcting a problem that I created myself.
Here's a little riddle for you...
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