Something ate a lot of my shoots last year. I hope this helps. I don't know what it was, if it was a racoon I'm guessing this won't help. Hopefully it was just a squirrel or something..

Wow, that's a very good upsize for moso(2 inches?) on the far right at the bottom. It looks big enough to feed a whole family of squirrels for a week. It's kind of weird how the other ones aren't upsized like that.

If moso is already coming up this far already in VA, I think my moso bicolor might start shooting on the first week of April given that temperatures don't plummet for the next month.


How old is your moso? Is it the anderson clone? If I'm not mistaken, VA ranges from zone 6 to zone 7 which is not that much different from where I'm located.

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Yea I know, that was one of the first ones to come up and I was kind of disappointed that the others were so small. There are a few others almost that size though. It's been planted there since 2007 and it was about 2 years old when I planted it. I got it as a seedling on Ebay, I'm not sure if it's the Anderson clone or not. I also bought a 5 gallon Moso from Mid-Atlantic Bamboo and it is a lot less hardy than these. The one from MAB will be completely top killed while these suffer just some leaf burn. This winter though there was no damage to either one because it was so mild. I'm in zone 7a I think.

Cool. I've grown nearly 1000 moso from seed from 2009 until 2011, and I find that some of them seem to be hardier or more vigorous than others so it is reasonable to believe that you might be lucky and have hardier seedlings. Some of them even produce little golden stripes on the culm and leaf variagation, but I only kept a few of them.

The good thing is that now that 2 incher is probably going to become the standard size to benchmark for next year's new shoots. It also looks like they haven't run that far in 5 years, but next year might be the break out year where they create picket fences all the way to those logs.

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mshaffer-
It was likely squirrels. Once they get hooked on the sugar-filled shoots, they consider it their salad bar. The set-up you have is exactly what I did when I lived in an area with a high squirrel population several years ago. It is totally effective as long as: 1) the squirrels can't easily move the wire mesh out of the way (I wired it to nearby culms or to stakes), and 2) the top is fairly well closed so they can't get down inside.