bambooweb.info

A topic of interest may be how much and when should bamboo be watered. I live in the Santa Cruz mountains, elevation at about 800 ft., and 8 miles from the Pacific Ocean I get almost all natural water December thru March. Almost none in the other months. I can get 20 to 90 inches of rain during the rain season. I do not provide unnatural water during this time. I try to capture as much rain as possible via mulch. If the rain is at the 20" rain level, we will be at drought level and water from local wells will be allocated and provided at high cost. In general, I do not provide water to my largest groves in the summer months. In low years, I am going to see critters attack plants to provide food and water. I do not have a irrigation system over my plus acre. Bamboo is an integral part of my garden, not the center or most important. In summer I water via hose for two days. I am moving more and more towards large pots to get max water to plants (less run off.) Various info I have heard: 1)water from top to bottom, 2) water slowly but at for more length. Hope you add more.

2 day watering? Wow that's some serious love.

I tend to water early in the morning/sundown to minimize evaporation. Back in the day I used use lay a hose on the ground and let the water run downhill but it would just pool up in certain areas while leaving other areas effectively dry. Then I started using sprinklers and drip irrigation. Seems to be much better at covering a large grove.

Thinning a grove does wonders IMO. With one of my groves I did some spring thinning by removing smaller culms. It's evident less mass means less watering per square foot. In fact I haven't watered that grove at all this year. Last year we had much more rain and the grove still needed in between watering.

Last summer I watered for an hour+ every AM and another hour when I got home from work - everyday from April through October. Every bamboo (all 85 plus all of the hundreds of other ornamentals) essentially were watered every other day at minimum. Then we had an amazingly dry winter and the spring shooting season was very wimpy and I saw an unusually high number of culms abort after going up several feet - drought behavior I'd say. So all my watering efforts did was prevent leaf loss and allow rhizome spread.

This year I'm watering once, maybe twice a week as it seems like more effort does not bear fruit. Plus, I"m moving to Hawai'i in a few weeks so I'm not think about next spring...

Sorry to hear that Brad. I hope it's a good move for you. I'd always intended to drive down the hill to meet you and your bamboo. Good luck on the move.

In the past I have heard (on this site) that soaking over a long period of time has benefits. Also, the local bamboo guru claims watering top to bottom as opposed to just watering bottom gets best results. I mentioned that I don't water large bamboo groves during the dry months (although I max mulch to retain winter water). My Madake, for instance) seems to produce many culms regardless. Rgds

In my experience, bamboos are pigs when it comes to food and water. They are not fussy. They are not very deep rooted so IMO deep watering insane amounts is just a waste. They will do better with light watering more often. In the ground they can gather far more water from less moist soil. In pots they are limited to what moisture is in the pots. Its the same with nutrients. I have to feed my potted bamboos, but not the ones in the ground. I grow lots of bamboo here in the ground and less in pots as I have sold down my collection in the past few years. I do not water my ground bamboos much at all, save for 100 degree plus heat for a few days, or several weeks with no water. I will water them with a sprinkler for maybe an hour at most. I get 80 inches of rain here a year on average, and it rains all fall, winter and spring. The summers here may or may not have a lot of rain. Last year it rained all summer, and this year it has rained all spring and into summer. This May I had 10 inches of rain here. So far in June I have had 6 inches. So I have not done much watering this year. If it has not rained in 3 days I will water all my potted bamboos. They tell me if they want water by curling their leaves like taco shells. I have silty soil so the rain does not pond up, so the bamboos do fine, regardless of the amount of rain that we get. I am on a good well here, and I have some of the best water in the world from the Bull Run watershed. If I lived in Portland and had to pay for the same water? Holy Moly, I could never have a bamboo nursery. The cost would be prohibitive. As it is, I pay maybe $15 a month in electricity to pump water here in summer. That's it. No rationing, ever, no dry well, ever. I live on the slope of a 4,000 extinct volcano and thus the hydrostatic pressure here is high and constant. The rivers run year round here as well.

Anyway, my Rx is to water bamboos less water more often.

With your in ground bamboos a lot would depend on your soil. Some soil retains water for the season while others don't. We have loamy loess soils that are very deep and can sustain a corn crop for eight weeks in July and August with no rain during a drought and still produce well. But then field corn roots down about seven feet. Fortunately we normally average about an inch of rain per week during the summer.
I would try to "train" your bamboo to seek water as best they can, and then supplement as needed during the heart of the dry season when the bamboo start to complain. Pots need to be kept moist as needed or you can kill the plants quickly. I never knew your area could receive so much winter rain.

Seems like having clay soil, it doesn't seem to matter if I water every day with a couple of buckets since we have a heat wave where it reaches 90F plus every day and there hasn't been any rain in a few months, usually very sunny every day. The shoots that were trying to emerge from the in ground d sinicus and d asper simply stopped growing or aborted if they were smaller ones. I'm just watering twice a week now to keep them alive until this drought/heat wave can finally come to an end. I've done my best by adding plenty of compost and mulch around these clumps however the water transpiration through the leaves just appears to be too much especially when we just can't get a break from the heat. When we can finally get a rainfall, I expect them to jump right into full gear and start shooting again.

With potted bamboos, it does look like using large pots with a soil mix that retains water very well and water holding trays underneath is the ideal way to keep them happy. This is my d asper hitam which is growing a very nice shoot regardless of the extreme weather. I water the potted ones almost every day because they dry out the trays and soil within a day or two.


I could install a drip irrigation or sprinkler system, but don't have enough in ground bamboos to make it worth the effort.