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Bamboo Shoot Hardening?

9 years ago

Hi all,

How long or at what height can it be said that the clumping bamboo shoots (varieties listed below) have sufficiently hardened to not be edible/palatable to squirrels?

A little background: We planted a few dozen clumping bamboos in the fall of 2012 to form a living screen in our back yard, including Fargesia nitida, Fargesia robusta 'Campbell', Fargesia robusta 'Wolong', Fargesia scabrida, and Thamnocalamus tesselatus, all one gallon plants. They have done well and are healthy. Our robusta and scabrida started sending up shoots in early February this year, and at a vastly more generous rate than the two previous springs - increasing the number of culms by 400-500%, awesome!! I roughly estimated we had at least 150 new shoots among a dozen plants.

However, we live in a highly wooded area - over a dozen large trees in our back yard, with many more on the neighbors' property on all sides. As a result, we've always had a large squirrel population. And unfortunately, they seem to love eating the new bamboo shoots. I thought we had the problem solved, since they had barely touched our shoots for the past two months. We are keeping them well fed with generous portions of sunflower seeds, as well as spraying animal repellant on all the new shoots. So I was greatly disheartened to come out last week and find out they had eaten about 75% of the new shoots! On several plants they ate every single shoot. On others, they severed the shoots but didn't eat them, just left them laying on the ground, how rude! Most of the eaten ones were already 2-3' high, though some were only a foot or so.

I have read that the only true solution (short of camping outside permanently with a gun and picking off every single squirrel indefinitely - not an option) is to use physical barriers. To that end, I got some PVC pipe, cut it into 2' lengths, and have put it around most the shoots that are left. I need more pipe since I underestimated the number of shoots. :) Ironically, this is only really possible now that they have been thinned out, as the shoots were previously too close together to get an individual pipe around each shoot.

Obviously I need to remove the pipe at some point before the shoots either get too tall (guess I could use a stepladder) or branch out too much to safely remove the pipe. But I'm not sure how long it will be before the shoots have become sufficiently protected against the voracious squirrels. I would like to be able to cut back the amount of seeds we're putting out at some point, as we're probably spending $50 a month on seed right now - could have just bought bigger bamboo!!

Cheers,

Aaron

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Comments (4)

Aaron Gilbert
Original Author
9 years ago
Just had another thought. I have read that exposure to light is what causes the bamboo shoots to harden. The PVC pipe obviously isn't translucent, so very little light will reach the shoots in the bottom 2'. Will that cause them to not harden, thus defeating the purpose of the protection? :)
kudzu9
9 years ago
When I had squirrel problems like you are dealing with, I used physical barriers. I bought wire mesh at Home Depot which has a 1/2"X1/2" grid and can be bought with a green vinyl coating. I cut it and formed it into 18" tall tubes that I slipped over the shoots and staked or tied in place. The mesh allows in light while the bamboo is growing. I found the squirrels lost interest in shoots that were in the 12"-18" range.
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2 weeks later, still no new shoots. The silverstripe didn't start shooting until around the 3rd week of June last year, so it's not necessarily late just yet. Still, I had kinda hoped that maybe the yin-yang or dwarf buddha belly are earlier shooters. The jury's still out on that one. Silversword, to give a late answer to your watering question: We have an irrigation system that hits the back yard twice per week around midnight. I'm trying this year to obey the local restrictions for water conservation, so that's the legal limit. I do occasionally soak just the boo with a hose, and any time my son gets sick of the kiddy pool I empty a few buckets around the clumps. We have also been getting rain almost daily for the last week or two. I may not be spraying them as obsessively as last year (and last year saw a huge rainy spell), but they aren't getting dried out by any means. They are full and green...just no shoots yet. I know the yin-yang is a fairly new and uncommon variety. Anyone else have wamin (dwarf buddha belly) in zone 9? When does it typically shoot?
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Aaron Gilbert
Original Author
9 years ago
kudzu9 - Thanks for the thoughts. I had read of the wire mesh idea from you previously, but it seems far more time consuming than slicing the PVC pipe into sections with my miter saw, especially when there are as many shoots as we are trying to protect. I asked the same question of Bamboo Garden (where we purchased all our plants), and they said the shoots don't need light to harden, only time. This seems to be the case, as all the shoots that have their lower 2' covered in pipe seem to be hardening just fine along the entire length. I'm still going to leave the pipes on until the last possible moment (ie when the culms start branching out), since I don't trust the squirrels at all! They have chewed and broken off fully hardened culms in the past.

Fortunately, all the plants which had shoots eaten have put out new shoots recently, 2-3 months after the initial flush. Some have put out as many as 6-8 new shoots, which although not as many as in February, we will take! I am diligently going out every day or two to check for new shoots and protecting them immediately. So far it seems to be working - haven't seen any pipes knocked over or pulled out by the squirrels to get to the shoots. :) Our Fargesia robusta and scabrida also typically put out more new shoots in late summer, and the squirrels aren't around as much or have other food sources/hobbies at that point. We are finally seeing new shoots from our Thamnocalamus tesselatus within the past week, albeit not in the quantities seen from the other plants - but they are huge comparatively. Our Fargesia robusta 'Wolong' are putting out tons of new shoots, but these are not bothered by the squirrels at all. The new shoots come up in the middle of huge clumps of existing culms, and even when very short, already seem somewhat hardened. The Fargeia nitida is the same, but they haven't started shooting yet.

Anyhow, all is not lost! We found some killer deals on five-gallon Fargesia rufa and Borinda and will be putting those in to help fill some of the gaps.
kudzu9
9 years ago
Aaron-
Thanks for the update. Sounds like you have it figured out. It's also great that you had more shooting...usually the squirrels eat at the "salad bar" and people don't see any new growth for a year.

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