Still wondering about these questions a couple years later. If anyone on this forum regularly eats bamboo shoots, I'd be interested in anything you have to share on the subject.

The discussion of breaking a King of Spades has me wondering if I need to be careful with mine. I only weigh about 145-150 lbs. I've pried on my shovel pretty hard, assuming I could pry as hard as I wanted without risking breaking it. Is that a safe enough assumption at my size?

I'd say moso is growing pretty well for me in zone 7 North Carolina. I'm pretty far inland, still in the Piedmont but fairly close to the NC mountains. I planted it in 2015, which was kind of in the middle of a series of extra cold winters, and I had a lot of die-back those first few winters, but th...

My moso has gotten big enough (very roughly 3 to 3-1/2" in diameter at the widest point, which I'm sure won't translate into canes that are actually that large) and is starting to spread in directions I want to limit it that I've started harvesting shoots to eat, and I have more to harvest now,...

Thanks for the recommendations. The Craft and Art of Bamboo might be the DIY book I mentioned. I remember the book I'm thinking of was written by a woman, because she was pictured in some of the demos in the book. If that's not the one I already read, I'll be sure to check it out. And I bought a cop...

I read one book on DIY projects with bamboo that had a good but fairly brief chapter in the front about how to use bamboo -- I can't remember the title -- and I've seen some things on the internet, but I'd really like to find more information and more in depth information about how to make the best ...

Question: how long, on average, should I expect my bamboo to live before it goes to seed? I think I've read something like that bamboo goes to seed every 70-100 years, but as I understand it -- please correct any false assumptions I'm making -- the clock starts ticking from the germination of the se...

The normal way to transplant bamboo, which is probably your only practical option, is to transplant in late winter/early spring, maybe a month or so before the time it starts sending up new shoots.

If Katy or someone in a similar situation were to just kick over all the big shoots when they first come up in the spring and then mow continuously after that, assuming it were possible to do that as far out as the shoots would come up -- how far would that be at the extreme? -- wouldn't that be an ...

I'm in z7 NC, so I think I'm in a pretty good area for both moso and madake. The man that let me dig up the madake lives quite close to me, and he has both mature moso and madake. Both have grown to at least 60' tall for him (and so presumably can for me here, too.) I brought home one random madake ...

Thanks, Fred. That more or less disproves the over-simplified accounts I've read about moso in bamboo nurseries' descriptions. Based on what I know about the attributes of madake and moso, madake does seem like it produces the superior poles for timber in every respect. I'm going to go dig up a piec...

rhbj03, you might be interested in this old thread:

http://www.bambooweb.info/bb/viewtopic. ... 264#p67264

I think I've read that moso is by far the most used timber bamboo in China, but what advantages does it have compared to Ph. bambusoides? I believe I've read that Ph. bambusoides grows straighter with even thicker (and presumably even stronger) walls. The internodes definitely appear longer on bambu...

This may be rather long, but here's my story, as a preface to my question of which bamboos you all would recommend I add (if anyone takes any interest in my long story). A nearby friend got me started with my first three bamboos two years ago (moso, some yellow type of P. aureosulcata, and P. vivax ...

Thanks for the additional information, Mackel. This may be asking too much, but if you have time and happen to find the motivation, I'd love to see the list of bamboos you've tasted (and anyone else's, too) with scores or letter grades or rankings... I'd be curious which ones you think are almost as...