Before You Hire
Including us. Eight questions that separate a bamboo quote that holds from one that comes back — and why the cheapest bid is often the one you pay for twice.
Bamboo removal is one of the few pieces of landscaping work where the difference between a good result and an expensive failure is invisible on the day the crew drives away. Nearly everything that matters happens below the ground, gets backfilled, and does not show itself for two to five years.
That makes bamboo quotes unusually hard to compare. Two bids can sit within a hundred dollars of one another and describe completely different pieces of work. Below are the questions that separate them. Ask them of every contractor you speak to — including us — and get the answers in writing.
Question One
Bamboos fall into two groups that behave nothing alike. Clumping bamboo expands slowly from a tight center. Running bamboo sends rhizomes horizontally, and some species travel thirty feet or more underground before sending up a single culm.
The removal plan for one is the wrong plan for the other. A quote that does not name the species is a quote written without knowing what the job is.
Question Two
This is the most important question on this page.
Rhizome is not root. It is underground stem, it stores the energy of the plant, and a severed fragment left in the ground can regenerate into a new plant. Equipment that chops — rototillers, some trenchers — can multiply a bamboo problem rather than solve it.
Ask it plainly: are you removing rhizome material from the soil, or cutting through it? Then ask how deep, and how they intend to handle rhizome running beneath a hard surface, a fence line, or a mature shrub.
Question Three
Rhizome buried elsewhere on the property will grow. Rhizome left in a green-waste pile will grow. Ask whether spoil and rhizome are hauled off site, and see that it is written into the quote rather than assumed.
Question Four
A great many bamboo problems originate on the other side of a fence. If the parent grove stays where it is, work on your side is maintenance rather than removal — and it will need doing again.
That may still be the right decision for you. But you should know which of the two you are buying before you pay for it, and a contractor ought to tell you plainly rather than let you assume otherwise.
Question Five
Get the specification in writing, and get all five parts of it:
We have dug up a good many failed barriers. They rarely fail in the middle of the sheet.
Question Six
An installed barrier is not a finished job. It is an ongoing obligation. Someone has to walk the line at least once a year and cut away any rhizome that has crossed the top. If nobody does, the barrier fails eventually, and you will not know it until culms appear somewhere you did not expect them.
Ask the contractor to say that obligation out loud. If a quote implies the problem is permanently solved and asks nothing further of you, that is your answer.
Question Seven
Be specific. Warranted against what — regrowth on your side, barrier failure, workmanship? For how long? Who pays for the return visit and the labour? What voids it?
“Guaranteed” on its own means nothing at all. Ask for the terms.
Question Eight
Every contractor doing this work in this state must be registered with the Department of Labor & Industries. You can look up any contractor’s registration, bond, and insurance status yourself, free, in about a minute. Do it.
Ours is SEATTB*913ML. We are bonded and insured to $3,000,000.
If one bid comes in markedly cheaper than another, the difference is usually hiding in questions two, three, and five — how much material actually leaves your property, and how deep the work goes.
That is not always the wrong trade. A lower-cost intervention can be a reasonable choice when you understand what it does and does not do. What we would ask is that you understand it before you buy it, rather than after.
We will review any bamboo quote you have received, at no charge and with no obligation. Send it to us with a few photographs and some measurements, and we will tell you what it covers, what it leaves out, and what questions to take back to whoever wrote it.
If the answer turns out to be someone other than us, that is a perfectly good outcome.
Email us your name, address, best contact number, and the best times to reach you. We often call when in your neighborhood if you need us to stop by.