Nice new shoots after a good rain last night this happened in 8 hours
don't know whats going on with the crappy resolution will try to get better ones in the morning before work

I have a P Nuda and over the past 2 or 3 days it has grown 9 new shots. I need to transplant it into a larger container and was thinking about trying to start a new plant when I move it. Aside from putting it into a pot I haven't done anything to it in the 3 years since I bought it. This sudden burst of growth is a surprise since it has only grown 3 new clums about 5 feet tall since I bought it. Is it a good idea to take one of the smaller new culms leaving some roots attached to start a new plant? I suspect the new culms may be roots that hit the end of the container and started growing upward. The larger ones are starting to grow leaves already, the smaller ones are a few inches long last I checked. I saw one picture of a nuda shoot called a shoot/ rhizome and it looks exactly like my new shoots. Any ideas or sources of information would be appreciated. Thanks

I know I've posted tons of pictures on mini divisions with multiple techniques, but if you are dealing with phyllostachys nuda which tends to lack vigor and be slow to upsize, I would suggest leaving it alone, especially because it sounds like you have a new plant. The only bamboo that seems to be immune to having tons of divisions taken off already on year 2, without much set back is parvifolia, but with most other bamboos, you would probably end up wasting plant material, and weaken your bamboo. If you are in upstate NY where the summers are relatively cool, then it might take up half of the remaining growing season for your bamboo to recover & produce rhizomes from having divisions taken off. If rhizomes are produced too late in the season, it can really reduce the size of the shoots for the following year.

New culms, even if they are hardened, and leafed out tend to fail very often, even if you have a good section of rhizome, and remove it surgically to the point where none of the roots are broken. Most likely the division will dry up, even if you use cloning powders/gels/hormones, myccorhizal fungi, and very good soil. I would suggest planting it in the ground, and waiting at least 2 years until it starts running. Once it starts taking up some space, and has lots of rhizomes going in all directions, then it is OK to either dig out a field division, or run a rhizome through the drainage hole of a nursery pot for a whip shoot division. Also, your shorter shoots might end up aborting if you haven't seen much growth on them lately.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/31489820@N02/

http://stevespeonygarden.blogspot.com/

That is a new rhizome and it looks like it intends to dive back into the ground and continue being a rhizome - it may however, 'decide' to curl upward and branch out becoming a culm instead. You will probably see multiple examples of this on a fairly young plant, when they dive back down they make very nice trip loops for you.

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Brad Salmon, zone 5b/6 Southern Indiana
Winters -20 to -25C. Summers 30 to 35C , humid. 115 cm annual precipitation, frost free from May through early October. 259.3 meters elevation. Growing 150+ species. http://www.needmorebamboo.com/

stevelau1911, thanks for the info. I took a look at the pictures from your link, looks like you have a real nice selection! I posted a handful of messages a while back and decided to re-pot my Nuda into something larger than what it's in now rather than put it in the ground. I know being in a container will limit size. I live in Staten Island (NYC) so it's not as cold here as upstate. Had I known of this forum before I bought my P. Nuda I may have bought a different variety. It seems the claims of it's hardiness are somewhat exaggerated. I was looking mainly at temperature tolerance at the time and the quoted -20F seemed to cover anything it is likely to ever see here. I would still like to get another variety that I can leave outside, a larger diameter culm- an inch or more. It very rarely gets down to 0F, maybe a couple days in the single digits for a really bad winter. Is there any variety you know of that might fit that description?

The 3 bamboos I have that currently have some culms exceeding 1 inch in diameter are atrovaginata, dulcis, and parvifolia which also seem to be the quickest to gain size for zone 6a. We get down to -2F on an average winter, and all these bamboos are definitely hardy enough to hold green leaves once they are established in my climate. There are a lot of other bamboos that also reach large sizes. It appears that you might be in zone 7 so you might even be able to successfully grow the timber species such as moso, bambusoides, and henon which tend to be a bit less hardy than the ones I'm growing. Those might get very big for you if you tarp them for the first few winters.

If you would have come onto this forum 2-3 weeks earlier, I still had lots of phyllostachys parvifolia whip shoots/rhizomes available, but now it is a little bit late as the rhizomes are already shooting, with shoots up over 6ft. There are other forum members that will also have rhizomes as well, on all different species, but the best time to get results are March and April. This year, I'm wondering how tall 1.25 inch shoots can get, and I'm guessing that they should pass 15ft as long as it doesn't stay cold & cloudy for the next couple weeks.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/31489820@N02/

http://stevespeonygarden.blogspot.com/

I just looked up my zone on the updated map and it came up as 7A. I've seen Dulcis mentioned along with Bisetti and a few others- there's so many varieties. There's a bamboo search engine on this site which I'll have to use again. I know I've played with it a while back and it seemed pretty good. I am guessing it's best to stick with the more common varieties mentioned on the forum, plus the fact many varieties don't even seem to be available from nurseries. I bought my Nuda from Raintree Nursery and they have a fairly good selection including a number of timber bamboo. I'll have to do some searching through the forum and get an idea of what people may have available. Some of those may be good for my climate.