Bamboo
waterhen
Posts: 5
i have a large bed of bamboo that is about 5ft away from my pond. It has been there for 20 years and has suddenly decided to come thro the pond liner. It will have to go but how. Any ideas as the best way to tackle it.!!
0
Posts
For what's worth, it's going to be very hard work. A few years ago I had black bamboo across my back fence which was jointly owned. Cut a long story short, I started the process to remove the bamboo because the neighbour wanted to renew the fence. It was a long process because it has amazing ability to survive whatever you throw at it. You can dig, hack, seek to poison it and it still throws up new canes, but after two years I declared victory. Today I wish I hadn't bothered, the neighbours are long gone, I miss the privacy and I am in the process of growing a Portuguese laurel hedge to rectify that problem.
Should of said, killing it is one thing, remove it is quite another. The roots are so dense and I must of gone through countless tools. Best of luck, saying that I suppose it's down to what kind of bamboo you have. Believe me, it's not easy.
To be honest, my experience of removing bamboo is very different to Nick Fareham's. I had a clump about 8' long and 3' wide. It had been well behaved for years but went 'rogue' due to events I won't repeat here as I've described them previously.
To remove it I cut the majority of the canes to ground level but left a number of thicker ones so that they could be used as levers when removing clumps. I then used a pick to dig a trench all around, which also exposed any runners heading off into the wide, blue yonder. I cut through the runners and also divided the main clump into sections to make removal easier. Again using the pick I dug under each section to loosen it then rocked it back and forth to remove. Repeated that with each section until is was all gone.
Final stage was to trace the route taken by each runner by pulling gently but firmly up and cutting above it where it was running through the lawn. That also enabled me to spot any other runners setting off from the main stem. That was done 3 years ago and I haven't seen any sign of bamboo since.
It was time consuming but not particularly difficulty. The bamboo in question was Phyllostachys Aurea.
KT53
You make it sound it so easy. To rock it back and forth you have got to get some movement in the first place. The roots of mine were so dense it withstood, sawing, digging, and the pick made no impact, it bounced straight off it. The only way I managed was working from the edge, slowly removing bit by bit and it was, bit by bit. In the end, I left some dead root the ground and while renovating my garden over the past 18 months came across the leftovers, after two years in the ground they were rotten, even then they put up a good fight. Have to be clear I am not talking about one plant I had a number which formed a hedge, they were about 15 years old.
Removing a hedge may be somewhat different, but my bamboo had been in for at least 20 years. It had been contained by a barrier which meant there was a fairly defined edge to it. As I said previously, I just dug the trench around and then undercut each section.
It certainly sounds as if yours had created a much thicker mass than mine had, although mine was pretty thick in places. I used a variety of tools including pick, mattock, pruning saw and spade.