Bamboo has to be close to being the world’s most useful plant:
Good for building, good for fishing poles, good for fences, good for support stakes, good to eat, good for burning in a rocket stove, good for curtain rods, good for making mats, good for almost everything.
Yet people hate it.
I don’t get the people that are so scared of “invasive” plants. That fast-growing tendency means you get higher yields faster. Maybe you want lame plants that take like 10 years to grow. I don’t. I want fast production of useable material!
Bamboo is the bomb.
3 comments
Don’t forget all the wonderful microbes that bamboo attracts to your garden
I have not looked into that – I will!
One year from August to February we had rain on average 5 times a week. My back yard was mud soup. I had to walk the back yard at least twice a day due to having chickens. Often I walked it dozens of times a day. I got stuck in the soup many times and the soup had reached the red clay level 12 inches down… most places it’s 3 inches down but I built up a thick layer of organic goodness. I was getting miserable. Chickens I were breeding were getting mites because dust bathing was impossible and 2 hurricane (minus wind because I was far from the coast) had dumped inches and inches of rain that fall. Pure misery.. then with my surplus of bamboo I cut hundreds of 4 foot poles and laid the down on the mud. I made 4 foot wide bamboo highways. Sure most of them sunk down an inch or 2 into the mud and the bottoms of my shoes still got wet and muddy, but I stop getting stuck in the mud and could tend to my chickens more often and not get stuck. I never had to clean it up either. It just composted in place and grsss grew right up threw it. That’s why I love bamboo. You can do so much with it and if you need a lot of it… no problem.. it will produce a lot of itself.