How hard is it to get ride of bamboo?
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Anonymous
| We are interested in a house that has a LOT of running bamboo in the yard. As in, a hedge that goes all the way around the property. Assuming we hired a professional landscaper, how hard is it to eradicate? What kind of money would we be looking at to get rid of it? |
Anonymous
| It is very, very hard. I don't know if it can be killed by herbicides, but if so and you can tolerate that, it may not be too expensive - you cut it all down, treat the stubs, and keep treating the stubs with herbicide as sprouts come up. You'd also probably have to commit to mowing that section every few days for a few years to whack off any surviving shoots, which come up very quickly and grow very tall. Maybe you could get a panda? |
Anonymous
LOL! |
Anonymous
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Really? Do you ever give up OP? Assuming this it he obsessed and obsessive poster here. We can only you are a JOY to live next to! Sarcasm, of course.
If you are not the insane bamboo poster (we bet you are) then you may wish to know that the bamboo has probably been there for decades, has not and will not affect anything, and there is likely absolutely zero reason to remove it. Most species here do NOT spread. The crazies will try to convince you otherwise in their own interest. Cue the alarmists and fear mongerers who have actually claimed the insane and outrageous with a straight face. Get help, please. We are all tired of you. |
Anonymous
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it he = is the
PP here. OP, it is a nice fence around your property. Why on earth would you want to get rid of it? Everyone I know keeps their bamboo for that purpose. It does not attract anything. The only thing I have seen attract anything are items kept in the yard (car parts, for example) or tall grass. Funny, the neighbors that have the latter are the first to complain about (of all things) bamboo 
You would be foolish to try to get rid of a natural screen which harms nothing. |
Anonymous
What? Bamboo is an invasive plant and is not indigenous to this region. Those are two very good reasons to get rid of it. It has a very high likelihood of spreading to your neighbor's yard. And yes, I know of real, actual experiences where this has happened. That said, I don't hate bamboo. I just think people are foolish to plant it. If you like bamboo, keep it in pots. It's sort of like kudzu in the South. |
Anonymous
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We have bamboo in our yard (which we did not realize until we closed on the house, due to the time of year and the previous owner cutting it down for show!). It runs all on the side of our house and along the backyard. It is VERY difficult to get rid of and we spent the first two springs/summers (starts growing really fast around April up until about August) cutting down each shoot and painting on concentrated herbicide. We would do this every week or so which would take hours. We had a couple of people come in to give us estimates, but were quoted for thousands of dollars with limited confidence that it would actually take care of the problem.
What we were told is that unless you kill EVERY individual shoot, you can not fully kill it, since it will just come up somewhere else. We had also heard that if you poison it and then put heavy tarp over it to prevent any sunlight from getting at it, it would die....but then we were told by one of the landscapers that if we did this, it could go underground a find a new place to come up - maybe even under our driveway or foundation of our house?! Not completely sure if this guy knew what he was talking about, but it was enough to scare us out of doing that. We were pretty frustrated and not to be dramatic, but I had wondered how long we could actually stay at the house, having to put in hours of work every weekend just to make our yard look presentable, BUT things have so much gotten better!! After the two seasons of hard work, the bamboo is still there, but the growth has slowed considerably. I would say we have only had to cut it down a handful of times this season and it was far less labor intensive than the previous years. I am hopeful that it will continue to get better. Now, we don't grow anything else in these areas just yet and I imagine we won't be able to for a long time, but that is OK with me as long as I don't have huge stalks up bamboo taking over the yard. So, if you are willing to put in a couple of seasons of hard work, I would say it becomes very manageable after that, if yours is anything like ours. I certainly do not regret buying my house, and likely would have bought it anyway even if I did know there was bamboo, but it has most definitely been a time consuming hassle. Good luck! If you find a zoo to contract with to come and cut it down and feed it to the pandas, let me know because I would like to get in on that 
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Anonymous
| PP here - we kept the portion that was a natural screen in our back yard, and see no problem with that, it is actually quite nice. The portion we have tried to get rid of is in our very large side flower bed that had grown out of control - it had spread from our backyard to that area, and a bit to our neighbors yard, but seemed to have stopped there! |
Anonymous
| Whoa. OP here, and not, not the "crazy bamboo person" someone mentioned. Seriously, just curious what it would mean to eradicate something that takes up a huge portion of the yard. We have two little kids, and are interested in a yard they can play in, maybe put a swingset into, and there is a dense, 2.5 foot hedge in front of the house and a slightly narrower version around the back. Walking around, there were shoots EVERYWHERE, across the property. My 2 year old isn't the steadiest on her feet, and there's no way she could safely walk around the yard without tripping over yellowing shoots. Part of the appeal of this place would be the move from our no-yard city townhouse to this place with a front and back yard. But if the lot is going to be a years-long project, the kids could get too big to enjoy it before we actually got a lawn for them to play on. |
Anonymous
(not OP here) actually, I wonder if YOU are ever going to give up. you must be the obsessive poster who keeps insisting on every thread abotu bamboo that bamboo is great, does not spread, it's easy to remove and so on. YOU and YOUR spreading bamboo must really be a joy to live next to |
Anonymous
| you need to burn it |
Anonymous
| It has taken my parents almost 25+ years of cutting back and burning to bring a patch of bamboo under control in their yard. It is very, very hard to get rid of without a panda. |
Anonymous
| So even with professional landscaping help, it is a pretty intense undertaking? |
Anonymous
| We have bamboo and it is almost impossible to get rid of it. Even if you cut down the shoots that grow in the spring, it moves quickly underground, so you have no idea it is there. We put in a three foot heavy plastic barrier (we had someone install it) and that really contained it. It is nice that it is green all year, but it is a lot of work and our neighbors hate it as it always spreads into their yards. |
Anonymous
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I would suggest poisoning public property or property that is not your own. In addition, you should really consider lighting it on fire, especially if it is on public property or property not your own. The authorities really, really favor that kind of behavior.
Bamboo spreads overnight and has been known to kill people in their sleep. Is that what you want to hear, OP? Wow, give it up. |