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What fertilizers do you use for your bamboos? Organic or Synthetic? What brand? When and at what rate do you apply the fertilizer?

whatever suits you. spring and fall.
any grass fertilizer from the box store(i like no weed killer)
if i had easy access to animal manures i would use them.
i have used peters professional.
worm tea til i killed them.(the worms not the boo)
compost.
happy thoughts
all of the above
bamboo is a heavy feeder. i'm still working out application rate.
this year i applied what i thought would be way too much synthetic(i forget the brand but a slow release 10-10-10 i think) and i am already thinking it was not enough. still early though. i,ll use something lower in nitrogen in fall or top dress with some boughten compost.
peters or miracle grow in between if i think they need it.

I have an unlimited supply of rabbit manure and use that freely as it is a cool manure. I am curious though what slow release fertilizers the pros use and at what application rate.

Part of our answer lies in knowing your soils. I use a lot of Soil Sulfur because my soil is pretty alkaline. I also use fertilizers produced especially for this are by local nurserymen that know our soils.

Of course, I also use plenty of premium compost. I buy the 33 yard truck loads of that stuff. I also top coat the entire mixture with Cypress mulch to hold in the moisture and acidify the soil a little more. Down here you need something to hold the moisture.

Of course, my answer may not be the best answer for you unless you have a alkaline soil and more clay than sand.

I just hammer some fertilizer spikes in my bamboos because they will feed them for the whole shooting season. I add manure and mulch on it too.

I have been using milorganite as well as soil sulpher and aluminum sulfate I noticed that some of my plants were looking a bit chlorotic so the milorganite supplies some iron and the sulpher/sulfates seems to make it even more available.

Lots of organic high N fert after shooting and most important in late Summer and Fall. Light to no fert in the Spring at shooting time. Too much fert early in the year pushes out too many small shoots. Feed like made in the fall as this is when the Bamboo is storing energy for the Spring shooting cycle. sounds backwards I know but it works .
All the best
Steve

do you think that the more you have to wait to see one variety shooting , the bigger are gonna be the shoots ? or there is no link between the shooting period of a variety and the size of the shoots ?


thank you,

Steve in France wrote:Lots of organic high N fert after shooting and most important in late Summer and Fall. Light to no fert in the Spring at shooting time. Too much fert early in the year pushes out too many small shoots. Feed like made in the fall as this is when the Bamboo is storing energy for the Spring shooting cycle. sounds backwards I know but it works .
All the best
Steve

I already unloaded a lot of grass fertilizer onto my bamboos, and if you are right, I made a big mistake. All my bamboos are starting to leaf out which means the shoots are all on their way.

Does this mean my shoots will be smaller than if I didn't fertilize them, or does it mean I will get a lot of extra un-necessary small shoots? My goal is to have a few upsized culms instead of a lot of small ones.

Also if it hasn't been raining a lot, will watering help to upsize the shoots bound to come up in the next couple weeks?

If you feed the larger growing species (the runners in general) before shooting you can trigger smaller buds to grow therefore more small shoots. The best bet if you get a lot of unwanted small shoots just snap them off.

The clumpers are different though, you can feed them as long as their growing during the season.

I feed with a mixture of chicken poo, mulches of manure/spent compost and then a high nitrogen lawn feed. It has a nitrogen value of 36 (NPK), this promotes blade growth and as you know the more blades the more energy the bamboo can produce. Too much fert though and you end up with too much foliage which can obscure the culms and cause them to lean a lot.

As Steve said summer and fall is the time as the new culms will be growing their own roots and the rhizome will be on the move.

Watering could increase shoot size it depends I suppose how far the buds have grown already. I think the bud reaches a certain size depending on conditions and then when everything is right off it goes. I know the branch buds growing are an indication of growth underground but I'm not sure if the buds have reached their maximum size already.

I suppose if the ground is still cold don't water too much or you may rot some of the new shoots possibly. Depends where you are and how cold it gets and how it quick it warms up in spring.

I still feed a month before shooting and have not noticed the numerous small shoots thing, but I'll watch closer this year and see. After a severe winter with lots of top kill, I figure that they can use the extra food, thus far I don't see any signs of this pre-shooting impact, I used 12-12-12 granular, quite liberally as usual.

Sorry for this resurrection, but I was just wondering what you all thought about this.

Taking into account the nuggets of wisdom by Steve in France and gaz rogers about feeding just around shooting and the resultant triggering of extra small shoots, would it not be possible to get bigger shoots by simply breaking off all the extra small shoots as they appear after applying fertiliser?

Your thoughts?

needmore wrote:I still feed a month before shooting and have not noticed the numerous small shoots thing, but I'll watch closer this year and see. After a severe winter with lots of top kill, I figure that they can use the extra food, thus far I don't see any signs of this pre-shooting impact, I used 12-12-12 granular, quite liberally as usual.

This year I'm seeing very few shoots at all on most species so those are not exhibiting the many small shoots from feeding. A couple of species are shooting quite proficiently and many are smaller but that could well be a top kill thing. Jury still out on this for me...

needmore wrote: This year I'm seeing very few shoots at all on most species so those are not exhibiting the many small shoots from feeding. A couple of species are shooting quite proficiently and many are smaller but that could well be a top kill thing. Jury still out on this for me...

I'm seeing that as well but secretly hoping that everything is just late and/or lazy. I think my phy Decora is a prime candidate for getting dug out and thrown away on account of its performance (or lack thereof) in the last 3 growing seasons.

Exactly HOW does everyone apply their fertilizer, and can fertilizing heavy on the bamboo hurt the surrounding grass? My first try at applying fertilizer was with a push-type spreader and there's no way I can go heavy on the 'boo without also going heavy on the surrounding lawn. I put about double (maybe triple?) the recommended grass rate of a high-nitrogen 5-month release "Sta-Green" - but don't feel like I got enough on the bamboo, and too much on the grass.

Can you spread by hand through a grove without dumping clumps in spots by accident and killing/burning the bamboo? Is there another method that works better?