Can Do Bamboo

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That said, bamboo will also - like other grasses - adapt to the conditions in which it finds itself. My 35-year-old grove of henon bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra henon) receives only rainwater, which in Seattle generally means three inches per summer. My plants grow to 31 feet, producing two-inch diameter poles and the equivalent of 2 1/2 tons of bamboo shoots per acre.

While productivity is no doubt improved by increased water during the growing season (the Chinese claim to get 10 tons of shoots an acre in managed groves), bamboo can survive on whatever water is available.

Runoff and Water Quality

The endangered Northwest salmon depends on clean (i.e., nutrient-poor), very cold water. Conventional farming adds soil nutrients to waterways via runoff from pastures and plowed fields. The soil clouds and poisons clean water. It also heats up waterways by forcing the clearing of trees from the banks of ditches and small streams.

Bamboo can help farms reduce soil load to waterways and increase shade. Planted in the swales of pastures, bamboo will catch soil nutrients in runoff and prevent them from entering nearby streams. Planted along ditches and creeks, it will shade the waters and reduce heat buildup.

This is not to suggest that native forests be cut down to plant bamboo, only that bamboo might be used along waterways to replace annual and perennial crops, such as raspberries and grazed pasture.

Carbon Sequestration

As if its many beneficial characteristics weren't enough, bamboo can also reduce CO 2 buildup in the atmosphere. Because bamboo is evergreen, it photosynthesizes and turns carbon dioxide into sugars year-round. A natural bamboo forest grows new leaves and culms every year, realizing a greater annual increase in biomass than a tree forest. And a managed bamboo forest, in which 20% of standing culms are harvested each year to encourage new growth, outproduces a natural one.

Wildlife Habitat

Deer bed down in bamboo, birds hang out in it and beavers build dams with it.

If you plant bamboo mainly to provide wildlife habitat and to enhance water quality, choose the native American bamboo, Arundinaria gigantea, which under ideal conditions grows to 20 feet tall and an inch in diameter, but more often measures in at eight to 16 feet. While too small for commercial poles, A. gigantea is fine for garden stakes, fence pickets and fishing poles, and the wood is hard and durable.

If you are planting primarily for shoots and poles, choose the larger Asian bamboos. They'll attract wildlife just the same and are far more commercially viable.

WHERE CAN I GROW BAMBOO?

Bamboo can be grown as a farm crop wherever it is not killed to the ground in winter. In the U.S., that means the Southern and Pacific states. Where routinely frozen back, evergreen bamboos become low-growing herbaceous grasses and can be grown as garden plants but not farm crops. Bamboo is grown as an ornamental garden plant from Massachusetts to Florida, from British Columbia to San Diego and in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

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