Earlier this spring we spend a Saturday preping an area along the south side of our house for bamboo(read about it here).  We like that bamboo will grow quickly, prolifically and tall, covering and shading the south, hot side of our house.  We are also anticipating many other benifits, bamboo creates a lot of biomass to use in the gardens, poles for garden structures and food.

We ordered our bamboo from a company on Amazon, Maya Gardens Inc.  When the bamboo arrived it was beautiful and green with strong roots, it also came with a few pages full of instructions.  We decided to pot the bamboo up, instead of putting it directly in the ground, it was early spring and still quite cold, in a pot I could easily bring it inside at nights and give it extra loving care. In April we finally got around to planting it in its spot, and one plant promptly went brown and appeared dead, the other plant lost a few leaves, but seemed to be limping along.

I honestly thought we had lost one of them, the instructions said it may happen and it would still live, but still…..

The bamboo that had “died”

Then just this last week i was walking past the bamboo beds and something caught my eye.

Something small, and green was poking up among the brown stems of the struggling bamboo plant, then I looked over at the other bamboo and there were several healthy shoots, happily growning, happily green and happily expanding!

The grand experiment continues, I am excited and optimistic that this might actually work.  One hurdle over come, a few more to go and we have an established bamboo bed.