Bamboo Garden Nursery News & Updates
American Bamboo Society Annual Conference
Early Bird Package special for three day registration for the conference, October 17th through 19th.

This offer will expire soon!
Portland, October 17-20, 2019
 The American Bamboo Society Annual Conference is here in Portland, Oregon! This four-day bamboo event is packed full of fun and great information. It takes place in various locations in the Portland area. You can find out more about the event and register for one day or all three days by   following this link.   The conference includes bamboo building classes by Charissa Brock and Mark Meenan, as well as tours of beautiful bamboo nurseries, including Bamboo Garden. If you are interested in bamboo, don't miss this fun event!   View complete schedule here.
ABS
Summer Bamboo Maintenance
Time to Trim and Increase Watering
We are at the hottest and driest point of summer. This time of year, it is important to water your bamboo 3 to 4 times a week. Make sure that each plant receives at least a gallon of water per session. For newly planted bamboo, is important to water slowly in the center-top of each root ball, in order to avoid surface run-off and assure that the water saturates the dense root-mass. This will help the youngest canes develop healthy canopies of foliage, as well as produce rhizomes which in turn will produce a robust crop of new shoots next year.

It is also a great time of year to thin a grove and take care of root pruning for rhizome control. Most groves can be thinned by removing 20% to 30% of the canes by cutting them at ground level. In late summer and early fall, you don't run the risk of breaking new shoots while pulling canes out of the grove. This is the best time of year to harvest bamboo canes for woodworking and art projects. The bamboo is at its lowest starch content of the year, which means that it will be the most pest resistant.


Bamboo Fertilizer
If you haven't fertilized your bamboo yet this summer, now if a great time to do it. We developed this fertilizer specially for planting new bamboo. It's best utilized by incorporating into the surrounding topsoil. It is slow-release, 100% organic, and provides balanced nutrients for one growing season. Kelp Meal, Feather Meal, Olivine Mineral, and Mycorrhizal Fungi all help to keep bamboo growing optimally.

2.5 lbs = $25   ($10 + $15 ship)
25 lbs = $65  ($35 + $30 ship)
COST INCLUDES SHIPPING

Chusquea gigantea has flowered!
Chusquea gigantea in is full gregarious flower ! Most bamboo flower only once every 60 to 120 years! This is one of the most important full sun clumping bamboos in the PNW region. It is an exciting event because it means that soon (within the next three years) we will have a new generation of seedlings, some of which may show unique characteristics. It is especially hard to create small containers of this bamboo because the root system is too large to propagate smaller plants from field divisions, so we are excited to have a new method of propagation available. The parent plant will die after flowering, so we will have no other choice to continue production of this species. Read here to find out more about bamboo flowering .

After a bamboo flowers, it produces seeds. The seeds of our Chusquea gigantea were ready to harvest last week. In order to collect the seeds, we placed a tarp below the plant and shook each cane vigorously. The seeds that fell onto the tarp were ripe enough for harvest. After the chaff and seed were separated by winnowing (dropping the harvest lot carefully in front of a fan), the high grade seeds were stored and await planting in the future. We will offer the fist batch of seeds for sale in packages of approximately 100, at the American Bamboo Society conference in October. The new generation of seedlings should be available in Spring of 2021. It takes bamboo seedings a full year to mature into salable plants in #1 size containers.
Native to South America, this is one of the few tall and upright clumping bamboos hardy enough to be grown in zone 7 or 8 and is one of the hardiest  Chusqueas  in cultivation. This clumping bamboo can handle full sun, is very upright, and is one of the tallest clumping bamboos (topping at 24 feet with 1.5" diameter canes). It does perform better in the ground than in a container.

C. gigantea is one of the few bamboos with solid canes. Although technically a clumping bamboo,  C. gigantea  forms a slowly spreading grove of very upright culms, somewhat like  Phyllostachys culms . This bamboo has recently been named  Chusquea gigantea  by French botanist Jean Pierre Demoly.
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