DECISION MADE

I’m selling. House, land…and moso.

I got old, okay?

Next spring will bring on giant culms, some possibly bigger again than those six-inch-diameter monsters that emerged this year in the grove’s centre. By how much will the grove expand next October? A half-acre? And the year after that?

Time to hand on to someone younger and more adept at all the practical tasks. Opportunities enormous, certainties nil. One caution: between December and August one can relax and enjoy owning a bamboo forest. Or do optional tasks. Between September and November, there will be essential tasks. And springs will only get busier as the forest really does become Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon on the Macleay. The southern hemisphere needs to get ready for moso.

Here’s an advertisement for the place.

Plain, functional house and dam, no shedding or extras. I’ve experienced the usual pleasures and headaches of rural living. Mostly pleasures. But there is one exceptional thing about my property. I’ve left it vacant for months on end – obviously not in spring! – each year of the last three. Nobody came but the guy who reads the electricity meter. The trickiest part about selecting any rural property is the safety issue: secluded does not mean secure.

Here I’ve been safe in a completely private setting for many years. One reason my bamboo isn’t often talked about locally is that few people ever see it. Yet I’m not far from town: when energetic and training up for my European pilgrim hikes, I’ve been able to walk to Kempsey and even back. Seclusion and security without isolation: that’s a common claim but a rare find in bush living. It’s my property’s biggest plus, apart from, well, obviously…

***

UPDATE:

Today I did what I hate doing, and cut two new poles of this season. Control and shape of the grove is best achieved by removing those delicious shoots (some of which I’ll be eating tonight from the freezer) before they start to soar. But every year I miscalculate and leave a shoot to grow where it shouldn’t be growing.

New poles are heavy, brittle and all but useless. Their only value is as a flavouring and aroma for tea, as far as I know. Certainly, when I cut these big guys today they splattered a powerful perfume just like that of my bamboo-roasted puerh tea.

Really, one should never waste a pole by cutting it fully grown in its very first year – but it happens.

What also needs reporting is the length of these felled giants. One was twenty five paces long, one was a couple of paces longer than that. In a grove that still has not peaked, I seem to be getting moso as big as moso is supposed to get.

Just so potential buyers or investors know: this region produces serious timber bamboo, just as it produced those kings of yore, the red cedars, along with the great eucalypt hardwoods.

Not just a hobby-farm thing, is what I’m trying to say.

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