Bamboo in the Garden
Parent Q&A
Archived Q&A and Reviews
Questions
Want to plant bamboo for privacy
March 2014
Hi ~ Our neighbors cut down a bunch of trees that provided privacy between our houses. I am wanting to plant something on our side of our fence to create privacy and am thinking that bamboo is a great choice. I'd love to the name of someone who could come over and give us some ideas and a bid for putting in bamboo or other privacy screening plants. Thanks. Cat
I know a person that does Interior and Exterior plant designs and he has in his own house very nice Bamboo trees, and also very nice bushes that divide his house from the the two neighbors from each side. His name is Alvaro Elneser, his company is Creative Greenery and you can locate him at 4155095057. You can tell him you were referred by Bibiana Barrera. Good luck with your landscaping.
You may want to rethink bamboo, it's quite invasive and hard to control once planted. Look at an alternative, like nandina, or camellias. Here are a few links: http://www.hgtvgardens.com/garden-basics/nursery-school-avoid-bamboo-like-the-plague http://www.mnn.com/your-home/organic-farming-gardening/stories/why-you-should-not-plant-bamboo-in-your-yard Lola
My house had the same dilemma and i planted dodonea bushes. They are weedy, grow fast, and have reached 10-12 feet tall. Not an impenetrable barrier, but more like a visual one. Lynn
Bamboo Removal
Oct 1999
Does anyone have any experience/advice on how to remove bamboo from the yard? I have heard it is pretty difficult, and that you have to dig down about three feet to remove the roots. Also, does anyone have a recommendation for a person or company that does heavy yard work, and could do a good job removing bamboo? Thanks! Wendy
Ugh. This is not easy, but you can do it (without nasty chemical herbicides) if you are tenacious and stick with it.
If you are lucky, the bamboo is a clumping type rather than a running type. If it forms a huge clump of old culms, all you need to do is dig it up and out. The roots do not go deep; the problem is that the fibers are very tough to cut with a shovel. Ideally you can get all around the clump with the shovel, and pull the whole thing out in a mass. You can also try cutting it up with a power saw, particularly if it's in a confined space (next to a fence or patio).
If you are not lucky, the bamboo is running underneath your patio, your fence, and every part of your yard. If you see little sprouts of bamboo elsewhere in the yard (even 50-100 ft away; ours had crossed underneath a parking lot), you probably have a running kind. In this case, any little chunk of bamboo that you leave in the soil will sprout on its own after you have removed the main plant.
This is what encourages people to use chemicals. In my case, moving into a house that had perhaps 10-20 years of overgrown bamboo, but wanting to keep my garden organic, I took the elbow-grease route.
I cut down all the live culms; then cut up (with a power saw) the base clumps, and dug them out. I tried to follow every running root and dig it out. The ones I couldn't get (e.g., under a concrete patio), I watched for. A bamboo sprout can grow several inches in only a day or two. If the baby culm sprout gets to the point where it has unfurled or is 1 ft high, you've lost ground, because it feeds the underground plant. But if you can cut the sprout before then, you have taken another step towards starving out the survivors.
A year and a half of constant vigilance worked to eradicate the bamboo from my yard permanently. That may sound extreme (you're probably ready to buy some Roundup at this point), but it was worth it to me not to pour poison all over my yard. good luck! Virginia
You need to have someone dig out as much of the bamboo from your yard as you can.Then you need to dig something trench like a few feet deep along the fence so you can see the new bamboo approaching.When you see it put a rock under each new stalk so that it is not in the dirt getting nutrients.It will become stone like and won’t grow anymore.This also may kill the plant.You can also try boiling water and vinegar and putting lots of water on it.You could hire someone and then try to collect in small claims court.
I had someone come and dig up the bamboo from my property, and dig a trench and install a root barrier. So far, it’s been reasonably effective. There is still a small amount of bamboo that comes back (a lot of which spread from roots under my concrete path), but the Alameda Master Gardener’s program said if I keep cutting it back when it gets to 1m, it will deplete it until it gives up, if it’s disconnected from the main roots.
To fully get rid of it, I would definitely need to remove the concrete path which has a lot of roots under it, which is on my “someday” to-do list.
i hired Sarouen Prak - (510) 459-3317 - to do the digging up and installing a root barrier and he did a wonderful job at a fair price.