Question: How do you get rid of bamboo?
Answer: You don’t. It gets rid of you.
That’s not totally accurate, but I have to honor the legacy of the seemingly-obliterated bamboo in our backyard with some melodrama. We thought it was so pretty when we moved in until we realized it was encroaching on the septic drain field… leach field. (not to be confused with leeches).
We started hacking away at it. It smells like green tea at first and it blows so beautifully in the breeze. But then its smell starts to saturate your whole being and you start to hate it, like it’s trying to replace your cells and turn you into a bamboo stick person. We would hack at the rhizomes with an axe and start issuing primal screams like some kind of vigilante whacko in the woods all sweat-blurred, head-banded and shifty. I’m just glad the neighbor kid didn’t tumble down the hill to witness it.
The first year, before our enlightenment, HE used roundup. And to put it bluntly, the following summer and fall, we had no frogs or toads. We used to have a giant toad named Doug living in a rotted door lintel in the garage. Doug is no more. I wish I could go back in time and yell at myself.
We whacked and lopped, and dragged every last stick of it into piles that was taken away by a tree service who came out to take down some other arboreal horrors going on in our backyard. We tried to cut it to eight foot lengths and sell it on craigslist. We soon got fed up with all the people coming by just to check it out and say it wasn’t enough for their fence or it was too long… That was a big waste of time and bone spurs.
So, we had about 1/8 of an acre (3,000 square feet) of damboo in our backyard. It took us about three full years to cut it all down. The rhizomes travel about 6 feet per year. So we finally got them to stop growing. Now the goal is to kill the rhizomes that remain.
In May, for about a three week period, shoots will grow about 3 -6 feet per week. These are the stubby shoots that can be stabbed with a shovel. After that, for the next four months the rhizome sends up these whip-like colms that are harder, like the top end of the fully grown bamboo. You need a brush cutter equipped with a metal blade to cut these. Or you can try the the thickest weed wacker string (commercial grade). And you have to cut it down every two weeks from Summer through Fall. Yes, it’s awful. But HE’s been doing all that. Poor thing.
We could have kept the bamboo and spent all this effort digging a 1 foot trench around the bamboo and filled it in with cement.
I’m also looking into using agricultural grade vinegar to pour on it in the dead of summer. But I think cutting is the only thing that really works.
Maniacal run down:
- bamboo is a grass
- the rhizome is actually just one plant
- rhizomes will go about a foot deep
- cutting from May through Summer for four years is your best bet for killing it
- use a metal brush cutter or the highest grade string weed wacker
- Running bamboo is the bad kind. Clumping bamboo is the stuff that won’t take over (or so they say.)
- agricultural grade vinegar is ok. Round up is not.
Heart of the Garden 
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