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Post by circumspice on May 22, 2012 19:28:35 GMT -5
Has anyone on this forum ever raised bamboo for food or fiber? I was wondering which varieties would be best for food. Also, which would be best for fiber? How is the fiber obtained from bamboo? Is the process similar to obtaining fiber from flax? Another thing... In some seed catalogs there are listings for clumping ornamental bamboo. They state that the clumping varieties do not run rampant. Are any of those varieties good for anything other than as ornamentals? Just wondering...  |
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Post by rowan on May 22, 2012 22:06:12 GMT -5
I am growin a clumping variety (Black asper) and a runner (Moso). I chose these two because they are very big types that can be used for food as well as building and making heaps of stuff out of. My 1/2 dozen plants are still only small so I can't really comment on the usefullness just yet.
It is a good idea to look up the bamboo forums for more information as there are so many things to consider such as the hardness and non-cracking of the wood (culms) and growth habits, as well as frost tenderness and stuff.
What you grow will depend on your climate and what you want to do with the product. I don't know for sure but I can't see making fibre as something you could do at home..
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Post by richardw on May 25, 2012 0:36:46 GMT -5
I'm little unsure what's the name of the one i've got but i was told its an eatable type as well as been a runner,the patch is 4 years old and as you can see by the photo ive certainly prepared to contain it once it reaches the ditch.I use heaps of it as garden stakes but have never tried eating the culms but i do see Bamboo as a possible emergency food source if and when it came to the crunch. Ive found that Bamboo responds amazingly to heavy fertilizing  |
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Post by atash on May 25, 2012 20:32:07 GMT -5
Phyllostachys, any species, but the preferred favorite is the big one, P. heteroclada pubescens, or whatever it's called these days. "Moso". Sometimes still known by old name P. edulis. Same one Rowan has.
That's the one that is ubiquitous in Chinese food. It is the #1 favorite for eating, due to the size, and sweetness of the shoots.
It is fairly hardy, down to maybe 0F, but it's not the hardiest. There are hardier Phyllostachys that are almost as big. Even the smallish ones could be harvested.
Any and all tropical clumping types have bitter shoots. However, they ARE eaten in some countries--after leaching them out. I don't think it is worth the effort.
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Post by bonsaioutlaw on May 26, 2012 14:38:52 GMT -5
Just got some seeds for P. heteroclada pubescens. I am going to build an enclosure in the middle of one of our pastures and plant it inside. Cows, goats, and horses should keep it pinned down. I hope it can't run underground a hundred yards.
We have another type that we eat the shoots from. I don't know what kind it is, but the five year old canes are turning black.
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Post by circumspice on May 26, 2012 20:17:22 GMT -5
As a child, I lived in Houston, Texas. We had a fairly large stand of bamboo in our back yard. Unfortunately, rodents tend to love bamboo as a habitat. My mom fought a losing battle trying to eradicate the bamboo in order to get rid of the rodents. (mostly field mice & ugh... rats, along with squirrels) I remember playing in the bamboo 'forest', I loved it!
I love the look of bamboo, would like to grow my own bamboo stakes & I love to eat bamboo shoots. That's why I am looking into possibly growing bamboo. Is it very hard to contain the bamboo? What about the periodic die-off that all bamboo species experience? I read about that in an old issue of National Geographic many years ago.
In a nutshell, I know practically nothing about bamboo. I have even been known to kill the small pots of good luck bamboo... :/
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Post by atash on May 27, 2012 2:07:47 GMT -5
I was about to say they don't, when I thought about it and realized that is not quite true. They try to send up tell-tale shoots before running that far. However, technically, in time, their rhizomes eventually run for miles. However, most of them run quite shallowly. plus, you can tell which way they are headed, by the tell-tale shoots.
Maybe Phyllostachys nigra. The names of the species are all weird and mixed up--they were named for domesticated varieties, often several different domesticated varieties getting different names by botanists who did not recognize them as the same species. Bamboos are hard to classify taxonomically, because their blooming cycles are so long.
P. nigra is not a real or natural species; it's an artificially selected cultivar of whatever Henon bamboo is. It's a dwarf, and has unusually colored culms. The natural species is a big one, and quite beautiful in its own right, though less strikingly colored.
Most Bamboos, no. One exception is the genus Phyllostachys, because it has long underground rhizomes. But even it is not impossible to contain; it needs something like an 18-inch or so "root barrier" to contain the rhizomes.
There are a few other "runners" that have aggressive rhizomes. They're all the hardiest types, as tropical bamboos have no need of rhizomes to escape frost. The genus Sasa goes feral in my part of the world, aggressively invading streamsides in wooded areas. It is quite shade-tolerant, unlike most bamboos.
Clumping types are easy to contain, as they have no rhizomes. Each culm branches off of its predecessor.
Generally speaking, rhizomous types are hardier than clumping ("sympodial') type. There are a few exceptions, though, like some sympodial types from extremely high elevations, whose modest underground portions are nevertheless extremely freeze-resistant. Some Fargesias for instance are among the hardiest bamboos.
Something else that helps is if you diligently remember to harvest the shoots. It's when they get let go for years that they get out of control. You do have to let the plants replace SOME of their culms from year to year, as each individual culm only lives about 3-4 years before getting senescent (though my Chusquea seems to have rather long-lived individual culms!!).
I think 2 year old "wood" (technically, it's not really "wood") is the strongest for harvesting poles.
Technically, it's most but not absolutely all. A few things can vary. Bamboos are generally "monocarpic". They bloom themselves to death. Most species do not bloom every year, but instead typically on longer cycles, often around 15-30 years or so.
When they are blooming, they stop producing any other growth and just keep making flowers on and on until they exhaust themselves. Then they are apt to die.
However, there are a few exceptions. One is that sometimes there are a few live buds with just enough leftover strength, that a few new shoots survive. That happened to one of mine after it bloomed.
A few oddball bamboos have other habits, such as regular blooming and annual canes, an adaptation to extremely high elevations at which they live.
THAT SEED IS VALUABLE. Since most bamboos don't bloom often, there is often demand for it. For one thing, it will produce vigorous, virus-free (to start) seedlings.
Perhaps the genus Bambusa from South China, a subtropical genus that can take more heat than Phyllostachys, and more cold than the tropical types.
"Good Luck Bamboo" isn't a Bamboo. It's a Cordyline--Dracaena-like plants from Asia, Australia, and Oceania.
Many species of Cordyline are notorious for having extremely persistent buds that survive all sorts of mishaps. For example I have a tropical species here--Cordyline fruticosa--that survives as a freeze-back in a decidedly non-tropical climate. Frost kills the tops, but buds surviving in a caudex-like swollen underground base survive the winter, despite its deep-tropical origins.
They are gigantic Grasses. Most of them are tropical, but in Asia they have spread all the way to the Kiril Islands of the Russian Far East. The USA also has an amazing native species, Arundinaria gigantea, that used to grow along the Mississippi and its tributaries, now fairly rare but formerly extremely abundant. The amazing thing about it is that in its extreme northern forms it is the only naturally deciduous bamboo. It and a few closely related species are among the very few Bamboos native to North America. There are a few more in southern Mexico and Central America.
Europe has no native Bamboos. The giant reeds of southern Europe are not closely-related, and their Bamboo-like appearance is a coincidence. A lot of other plants that are even less related to Bamboo are often mistaken for same. Not all plants with jointed cane-like stems are "Bamboos".
Africa has only a few, though there are extensive cloudforest groves of a few species up in the high mountains of tropical southeastern Africa. South Africa has a few more.
Northern Australia has a few giant tropical types.
Asia and especially India is rich in them. In much of Asia they have had a lot of human help spreading. Most bamboo groves there are artificial.
The mother-lode is actually in South America, where the largest variety and most species of them are. In South America there are species with amazing varieties of specialization, such as growing on the Altiplano; there are a few xeric species, some are aquatic, some climb trees like vines (they drape their willow-like branches on their neighbors for support), many grow in tropical rainforest, in Chile there are species that grow in temperate rainforest, and also montane species growing up at high, snowy altitudes.
I have the forest species Chusquea gigantea in my front yard, a rare Chinese walking stick type in a pot, and the beautiful mid-size clumper Bolinda boleana behind the Ba-Jiao banana. A small Himalayan clumper, Fargesia nitida, in the back yard.
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Post by ilex on May 28, 2012 3:12:01 GMT -5
Many clumping bamboos are very good to eat, and very productive. Most are quite tropical. You have to think about your climate, soil and don't forget pest. I can't grow some due to mites.
A running bamboo shouldn't be a big problem if you are willing to eat the shoots.
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