Here’s a picture of my grove which shows how it dips neatly under the power lines. (This is the only neatness I have ever achieved, so please gush.)
You can shape and control a number of ways. My way is simply to harvest and eat new shoots. After shooting time, there’s no control needed. But one must be prompt at shooting time.
Here is a picture of the area under the lines, taken inside the grove.
All new shoots have been removed for some years now, within a strip extending some metres outside the power lines. Juvenile culms, which were never tall enough to reach anywhere near the lines, have been left in place. This gives the grove stability and keeps down unwanted species. The electricity people don’t like this, because, like most people, they are convinced that bamboo culms continue to grow after their first seven weeks of existence. It’s a hard thing to grasp: that a shoot a few inches tall will tower up to eighty feet within weeks, while a culm from a previous season will never grow by a fraction of an inch – ever!
Note how the grove in the top picture has a burnished-yellow appearance. That’s because we are now in bamboo autumn, which is spring, when moso puts all its energy into new shoots and withdraws it from everywhere else. Here on the hot western edge you can see the yellowing near one of this year’s first shoots.
Because this season is so good, the leaf-loss and discolouring are not as extreme as in past years. A few metres into the grove, the bamboo still looks quite fresh.
There’s still plenty of shade under the canopy in the centre.
***
Bamboo shoots are supposed to have health benefits because, among other things, they contain woody substances called lignins which are lacking in the diet of modern humans. Really, I wouldn’t know. But one great quality of shoots is their gentle but powerful effect upon the bowels. I don’t normally have problems in this regard, but when I eat moso shoots I definitely don’t have problems.
A couple of dozen more shoots were harvested yesterday. Rather than freeze these, I decided to make a traditional English pickle, substituting bamboo for cauliflower.
I’ve tried to ferment bamboo shoots to make a kind of Asian pickle, but the results were foul. I used a kimchee-style treatement, but what works for cabbage doesn’t work for moso shoots.
For classical English piccalilli, it’s normal to soak the vegetables raw in a strong brine before cooking them a little with the floury pickling sauce. Obviously, moso bamboo shoots must always be blanched before anything else is done with them, so I briefly pressure-cooked them in unsalted water with some bamboo charcoal before placing them in brine with the raw onions. Also, because bamboo is very absorptive, whether as charcoal or shoots, I used a lighter brine.
Apart from that, procedure was as usual. The brine is ditched and replaced with vinegar, to the level of the shoots in the pot. A paste of flour, turmeric and mustard is added, as well as sugar and some ginger. The whole is cooked gently for half an hour, till a saucey consistency is achieved, with no floury taste.
And it’s delicious!
Avoid it like the plague Memory Vault- here in Tully they planted a running bamboo along the Tully River east of the Bruce highway to stop the river from swinging northwards and washing away the Tully Heads road. It worked OK but now it is coming up on the other side of the road- the council can control it (just) but it would be a nightmare for a private citizen.
(I cut some stakes for trees and even though I put them all in upside down one sprouted and grew. Luckily I got to it before it got away)
How much bamboo can you eat?
It’s okay, gnome. This is moso where it belongs. I’ve had it growing here twenty years and I can’t get enough of it. Its main use is for timber, the shoots are a sideline. I’m just lucky it loves it here. Though it’s a temperate/subtropical which grows well in a few biomes, it’s also super-fussy, extremely difficult to propagate – mine is from seedlings of the world flowering of the eighties – and hates wet ground or short grass. It wouldn’t have a hope near the Tully. Also, without protection of the shoots in the spring it would be torn apart by wallabies, possums, bandicoots, brush-turkeys and livestock.
Of course, you are right to be cautious about sticking any running bamboo in the ground without knowledge or thought.
Hi guys,
Thanks for the feedback.
It’s okay Gnome, I won’t be planting anything – a bit too old for that.
But several years ago when I was living in the Maleny district I was approached by a group of dairy farmers who were in the process of being wiped out by milk from Victoria, to do a study to recommend alternative crops.
After much research I came up with a mix of bamboos for both wood and shoot production. However, after reading many horror stories about control (or lack of it) with running bamboo I stuck with clumping varieties.
I have maintained an active interest in commercial bamboo ever since, and I’m currently toying with the idea of a book about it as a guide for consideration of bamboo as an alternative crop in some places of OZ.
So I was just interested in how Moso got around the problem. I guess one could summarise it as the “right” species in the “right” place for it.
Again, thanks for the input.
Thanks memoryvault.
I know little about horticulture, or bamboo in general, but I’m guessing that there are good species for everywhere in Oz. Moso will only grow well in a few parts of the world, and eastern NSW , with its acid soils and higher humidity through the warm season, is one of the very few ideal spots. It seems to need hills and initial ground cover to thrive, though it cancels out the ground cover as it gets established to form very open forests.
The only thing I’m an expert at is getting the stuff to survive right here. Most expert advice I’ve received has been misleading or wrong. When local horticulturists tell me of their frustrations with moso I have to bite my tongue: if I did what they did, I wouldn’t have any moso either. But nobody wants the advice of a total amateur, so I don’t give it.
I think your idea of a book as a “guide for consideration of bamboo” is sensational. Similar material may already exist, but the potential of bamboo is so huge that an open-minded approach of guided trial and error is just what we need.
I find “control” of moso to be a total non-problem, but maybe it’s because I love it and fuss over it a lot. Certainly it’s worth repeating that moso might be okay in gardens in France and Germany, where it has surprising cult-like following, but here in eastern NSW it wants to form a big, gorgeous forest.
So don’t try it at home!