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stevelau1911 wrote:... It basically means if you have a 40ft culm, you can effectively reduce it down to 20ft in height to fit under a large greenhouse.

If you have a 40 foot culm there is probably no reason to need it to be in a greenhouse...

Here's an example of sheath pulling on a mature moso showing how quickly the culms can be tapered, and it looks like a mature moso shoot could still be tapered enough to fit under a 20ft tall greenhouse eh. This action may cause many other shoots to emerge, or cause the energy to be diverted into longer branches.

Even on a mature stand of moso, the leafing part usually ends up being no more than 25-30ft, and they are flexible too. In other words, with good maintenance, it should be possible to grow a giant bamboo in a cold climate. It just takes extra measures during shooting season to do sheath pulling every 2-3 days.

Steve -- what's the point of doing this? If it's to keep a smaller plant so you can protect it more easily with the goal of having large culms someday, aren't you restricting the growth potential by making the culms shorter? If they're storing energy that the plant will use next year, shorter node spacings means much less energy storage.

If it's just to sort of "bonsai" the plant, then I guess I understand.

What I've found is if you reduce the storage capacity in the culms, the bamboo will simply store energy in the roots and rhizomes because a bamboo that puts out a huge shooting season seems to take a lot longer to start producing rhizomes. This would still mean more growth underground. For example, I intend to keep my bicolor under this greenhouse for now so if shoots look like they will get higher than 18ft so it wouldn't be possible to turn them back into the greenhouse, all I need to do is remove some sheaths. I really don't want to get a taller greenhouse until I really have to because the cover on this one can be installed and removed very quickly.

I don't know why they are doing it in the picture, but I guess it looks pretty cool to have super compressed internodes, turning the bamboo culm into more of a tree shape.

stevelau1911 wrote:What I've found is if you reduce the storage capacity in the culms, the bamboo will simply store energy in the roots and rhizomes because a bamboo that puts out a huge shooting season seems to take a lot longer to start producing rhizomes. This would still mean more growth underground.

What are you basing this on? Your observations on a moso that you really mess with in your particularly unique climate?

Steve - There's a non sequitor there. Would it not follow that if you reduce the capacity to store by reducing the volume of foliage that you thereby reduce the amount stored? In other words you simply can't store more than you can produce, sort of like the perpetual motion challenge.

john

I believe the only reason that bamboos produce bigger culms is to rise above the canopy to get even more light once it gets too crowded. In any other case it's nothing more than a storage vessel for starch which can also be done by roots and rhizomes. If you are inside a mature bamboo grove, you will find that the point where leaves start may be as high as 2/3 the way up the culms.

For example, if you take 10ft culm, the branching will likely occur all the way close to the ground while when you take a 20ft culm, the branching may occur several feet up, so even though it may take about 3X as much energy to have produced that 20ft culm, the amount of foliage on that 20ft culm may be less than 2x the amount of the 10ft culm.


In getting established, I believe a bamboo would be much better off in putting most of it's energy towards leaf production instead of producing a few enormous culms. In terms of total foliar mass, even with all the winter damage that has occured, I really doubt there will be much of a drop off in terms of the total number of leaves per grove because a bamboo will usually do what it needs in order to survive.

Huzzah! I finally did it!

1. Peel off approximately 1 year old Chusquea Gigantea sheaths.
2. Wait for very sunny and/or hot day. (Was 88f today)

Blam! Red-Green Kaleidoscope Chusquea culms!

Wow. That's pretty spectacular. How long will they stay looking like that?

It'll fade out over the next few months, but it looks awesome right now!

Reminds me of the color that showed up on some P a spectabilis shoots that came up during a cold snap. In that case the color did not go away (like I thought it would), those particular shoots are still a dull purple 2 years later.