Taro & Ti Bamboo

New Henon shoot emerging about this time in 2008.

The hardest part of planting boo is thinking years ahead. After all, bamboo is a long term commitment. Once planted and established, it’ll take a bulldozer to get rid of it, so one has to be absolutely certain that it’s planted exactly where one wants it to be planted, and planted in an area where it can be perpetually maintained. It’s bed will have to be tended forever once it’s planted to keep it from spreading out of control. Or planted where it doesn’t matter about spreading. It’s actually not a hard thing to keep boo under control, but it takes a little effort.

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Happy Henon bamboo.

It’s been two weeks since I potted up the Giant Grey Henon, the Moso seedlings and the unidentified boo that I had planted at the back of the property and subsequently rescued after a total lack of progress for four years. The Henon is topside in a 25 gallon container and the other two are down in the pit greenhouse in 3 gallon containers.

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4 year old boo - stunted from years of drought.

This weekend ended up being a boo weekend. I potted up the Henon I got from JM Bamboo, potted up my yearling Moso seedlings, and today I went out to rescue the boo that was suffering at the back of my property.

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Recently potted Henon.

I recently got some Giant Grey Henon from JM Bamboo. It arrived in wonderful shape! The box took an act of demolition to get apart and the root-ball was bagged them shrink-wrapped – not a speck of loose dirt in there. The boo was pretty happy too. Since the weekend I got it was very cold and miserable, I just plopped it, wrapped root-ball and all, in our east-facing picture-window and left it there for a week.

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Welcome to Taroandti.com. I am a big bamboo fan. There are no end of uses for bamboo, it’s easy to grow, with care fairly easy to contain, and is just pretty to behold. I like giant boos and landscape boos and will focus primarily on those. I don’t like clumping bamboos and will not write much if any about that.

My ultimate goal is to frame my greenhouse and tropical/sub-tropical beds with a towering bamboo forest. Giant Grey Henon, Vivax and perhaps Moso will play a part. I have some very young Moso seedlings and Henon and will soon have Vivax as well. It takes a long time for large bamboo to get large, but it’ll be a lot of fun along the way.

As a fringe benefit – I really like bamboo shoots. To compliment my other bamboos, I plan on planting some sweet-shoot bamboo – a bamboo that produces shoots that require less cooking to get rid of bitterness.

Stay tuned – lotsa boo fun ahead…