Boo-Shoots for 2015

[mountainbamboonut]

Same here Shmu in Northern CA. Most of my phyllos are shooting already except for Madake and Vivax (one of my vivax plantings actually started putting up a shoot a few days ago but the other has not). Golden is going as is YG, black, bisetti, rufa, and my purple bamboo. If this storm coming this weekend doesnt hit hard then I think we are also home-free into an early spring. My peaches and pears have beautiful blossoms and have leafed out some and daffodils are in full bloom along with all of the native grasses booming. We are not even too far behind on rainfall totals after some heavy wet storms. But been sunny in the 60's for at least a month now maybe more. The bamboos look very very pleased.

[T9D]

None of mine in Oregon are shooting yet. Guess I'm the only one on the west coast

Probably because mine are all pretty young still I suppose.

[stevelau1911]

I think it is more about temperature. You may not have any extremely cold temperatures like we have on the east side, but I really doubt your average temperatures are getting up above 50F yet this early in the year. You may have enough warmth to get fargesias to shoot, but phyllostachys generally need soil temperatures to be between 50-60F to initiate shooting.

Mid April would sound like a more reasonable time to expect shoots in Oregon.

[wind-borne]

Thamnocalamus crassinodus

sold to me as Fargesia robusta 'Green Screen' but?

[mountainbamboonut]

steve, that is another issue i have with 'ag zones' as being a big indicator for what grows where and how well. zones dont take into account many things like how early one zone 7 may shoot as compared to another or how long the fall rhizome growing season is. this all has to affect the genetic potential of the bamboo being realized or not and how fast it gets there.

[T9D]

Next week is going to be 65 and sunny. But yeah it's been around 30 - 40 degrees at night though. I'm not really concerned about it. Just thought it was interesting others were shooting so near my town. Some of mine are putting on some leaves though. Shanghai 3 is putting out a lot of leaves. The culm that the Shanghai 3 put out last year has leaves that look nothing like Shanghai 3's small narrow leaves. They are short and fat. And different color green. It's bizarre. Doesn't even look like it's the same plant. It's like two different plants put together. Is that something that happens sometimes?

[johnw]

Hey wind-borne I think they got their "Greens" mixed up. What you have there - the last pic "gs.jpg" - with the pink shoots looks like Fargesia dracocephala 'Rufa'. Possibly a tissue culture form of 'Rufa' called 'Green Panda' just to confuse matters. Shoots come very early, canes not thick but extremely plentiful and height is about 2m / 6ft or so though they arch a fair bit so measure ground to tip could be 8-9ft. Sound right?

johnw

[ShmuBamboo]

If bamboos act like other grasses, as they seem to do in my observations, the average temperature does not have much to do with shooting time. Its the amount of heat accumulated starting from the beginning of each year that gets grasses going. I have posted it here before, but in pasture management they use heating degree units in what is called the T-Sum 200 guidelines to calculate the best time to feed grasses high nitrogen fertilizers in pastures in Oregon (when grasses are ready to take it up and grow in spring).

The formula for calculating heat units is: (maximum deg. C + minimum deg. C) / 2. For example if the high for January 1st is 40 F./10 C. deg. and low is 30 F /-1 C. deg., the number of heat units then for that day would be (10+0)/2 = 5. If the high or low temperature is below freezing on any given day, the high or low just gets a zero. There are no negative numbers in factoring for heat units. Once you hit 200, the pastures are ready to be fed. We have had some really warm unseasonal weather this year since January 1. Many days have been in the low 60s F. (15+ C.), and many nights have been near 50 F. (10 C.). So each one of those warm days and nights in early February resulted in 10 or more heat units. Lately here the days have been around 50 (10 C.) and the nights about 40 (4 C.) and those count as 7 heat units. All you need is an average of 50 F. degree days and 40 F. degree nights for one month and you get to 210 heat units. If the days were 40 F. with 30 F. lows, as is far more typical here, it would take a lot longer to shooting season where you only get 2 heat units a day.

Yah, sounds crazy, but it works. Many plants are controlled by temperature sensitive auxins (plant hormones). For example, apples require a certain number of hours below 40 degrees before they will sprout the following year. It is called the chilling requirement. My plum trees are now ending their bloom cycle, and my cherry trees are starting to bloom along with my other bulbs, 2 months early this year. Its been WARM! Record warm here in the Cascades, for the month of Jan and Feb going back 100+ years. The snowpack on Mt Hood is 1/10th of average right now, which is also a record.

[Tarzanus]

Shmu, that's what we call something like the 'heat sum'. At the moment we are somewhere around 150 and get around 4 to 6 new units daily. It will cool down again later this week, which means we won't hit the "awakening" in the following 10 days, but that day isn't far away for us. We have these numbers crunched by meteorologists and can be found under agro-meteorological data.

[Van-isle-bamboo]

Shmu that's some great information regarding the 200 heat units for grasses. Thanks for sharing that.

[dependable]

So we are still around zero T sum around here, ha ha.

[ShmuBamboo]

Yah, heat sum, or heat summation, temperature summation, heat units, degree days, growing degree days, growing degree units, all similar. It is used in a lot of different applications in agriculture not only for plants, but also for growing poultry and honey bees.

When I has a vineyard in Southern Oregon, we counted the heat summation using the UC Davis method. That counts the heat 'degree days' between April 1 and October 31 using a different formula to determine what varietals to grow in a particular area. I planted Pinot Noir, as that does well in areas by the coast that get less than 2500 degree days which is what we had.

A general overview of heat summation is explained here on Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_degree-day

The OSU T-Sum 200 pasture management system that I use in Oregon (which seems to map well to my bamboos shooting here) is explained at their web site:

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/dougla ... EarlyN.pdf

From the larger nurseries that I have talked to and visited on the west coast, the first nitrogen application of the year is the most important when growing bamboos commercially. T-sum 200 seems to be a good time to apply fertilizer to my boos here, as that is just before they start to shoot. It is also a lot easier to calculate the T-sum 200 value rather than digging around my boos and looking at the rhizomes.

[wind-borne]

Hey wind-borne I think they got their "Greens" mixed up. What you have there - the last pic "gs.jpg" - with the pink shoots looks like Fargesia dracocephala 'Rufa'. Possibly a tissue culture form of 'Rufa' called 'Green Panda' just to confuse matters. Shoots come very early, canes not thick but extremely plentiful and height is about 2m / 6ft or so though they arch a fair bit so measure ground to tip could be 8-9ft. Sound right?

johnw

Time will tell. Probably more than just mixed “Greens”.

They do have Rufas Green Pandas at that nursery, usually about 2 1/2’ tall and extending about a foot beyond the edge of pot with 100+ culms buried within.

‘GS’ I bought had about 30 culms, some about 5’.
The irony is I bought a Scabrida that day also. At the time, they looked different yet during summer shooting they began to look identical even though timing of shoots varied by about 3 weeks.
This repeated last month as the some Scabrida shoots now about 8” and the ‘GS’ shoots just appearing. Both have about 30 new shoots so before long my opinions may change, if so will start an ID thread.

Here is a couple ‘Green Screen’ culm/sheath shots from last summer. Chocolate, blue-black culms/orange sheaths

From a different 44˚N coastal perspective.

[johnw]

Wind-borne

Those dark canes don't say Rufa to me. I have looked at shots of my Rufa shoots and while yours look somewhat similar my Rufa develop bristly culm sheaths as they emerge a bit further. As you can see in my Rufa pix the bristles appear as the shoots get about 6-10" tall. Note the green culms here in full sun. Yours could be one of the Juizhaighous? I'll send you shots off to Steffen Greiner for an id.

[johnw]

And here are our Scabrida shoots. I haven't lived with it long enough to make any pronouncements though our canes are not the colour of yours though you likely get more sun than we do here in the fog belt of lat 44!