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Help Deciding on Indoor Bamboo

Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2016 6:15 pm
by JoshuaA
Last year, I had a P. aurea in my office room next to my desk in a 24" pot. It gets pretty much no natural light, so I added multiple lights (still not much). It went okay for about 4 months:
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It did poorly afterwards for multiple reasons... namely low light, low humidity, gnawing cats, and aphid infestations. The poor plant is now much happier outside, thankfully.

So I'm on attempt #2 now. Learning from my mistakes, I'm hoping to address multiple problems in one go. This is my current 3D mockup of what I'd like it to look like:
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This eliminates the cats' needs to forage and chew off a few leaves every other hour. It also will help with temperature and humidity control. I plan on maybe hooking up a humidifier + controller, or at least a pebble tray or something along with a hygrometer to keep it at a consistent level. The numerous high lumen output LED lights in a custom configuration will hopefully get as much light as possible packed into the top fixture, along with a fan to increase air circulation + heat diffusion.

So supposing my experiment build works, I still need to decide on a decent bamboo that would be happy in the setup. I'd prefer it to be all-year one, instead of having to rotate between different plants 1-3 times during the year. Which means it should be a tropical type, so it doesn't require dormancy. But those tend to want more light. So I'm a bit stuck. A B. multiplex sounds like it might be ideal based on searches I've done, but those seem to have larger leaves that would create too much vertical shadows, hogging light away from any leaves below the top layer. It would also need to be fairly upright, so it doesn't smush its leaves into the walls as much (26" maximum width).

Anyone have a good suggestion of what would work best in such a setup? Thanks for reading.