Seattle Bamboo Maintenance Services

The maintenance of a bamboo grove require both above and below ground tasks.

Often property owners will choose a containment method such as ceramic pots, metal troughs, wood boxes, or plastic barrier material placed around the planting area.

The nature of bamboo is that it spreads. All containment methods attempt to "tame" or "control" the spread of the plant. Containment, or confinement, attempts to thwart the natural growth behavior of the plant. If bamboo is planted to encourage the plant to spread, both the grove and the property owners will be far happier.

Containers, of whatever variety, tend to fill up with rhizomes and roots and can slowly starve the plant so that it works even harder to escape the confinement.

Maintenance of barriered bamboo is possible if the barrier is placed so there is room between the planting and the plastic to dig the spreading rhizomes. At first this will be required ponce per year. However, each time a rhizome is cut it can produce two new rhizomes, so the maintenance is required more often.

Seattle Bamboo removes problem bamboo groves almost every day of the year and we are convinced that lack of maintenance is the cause of a high percentage of the required removals.

Humans have not discovered a way to kill bamboo. There are chemicals that will kill the plant parts above ground, but no chemical will affect the regenerative portion of the plant beneath the ground. Digging this portion, the rhizome, out of the ground is the only way to successfully remove the plant.

Seattle Bamboo respects the plant and we attempt, if at all possible, to preserve the plant for the use of others. Our first priority is to the Woodland Park Zoo. They use the plant both for zoo environments as well as food for many of the animals. We also give away plants to people willing to pick them up. We carefully remove the bamboo from the ground and manicure the rootballs to enable successful transplanting.