Please help-Bamboo is in bad shape

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LeeRamirez
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Please help-Bamboo is in bad shape

Post by LeeRamirez »

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Hey everyone, my name is Lee and I am in Houston, Texas. We recently had a bad freeze and it destroyed my 3 year old Bambusa textilis trees. They came out to prune it and they cut it down from 20' to 10'. It has lost most if not all of the leaves. They fertilized and put compost. What can we expect for this spring and summer? I am not really sure how to post pics. I'll try to figure out how to so I can show. Thanks!
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needmore
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Re: Please help-Bamboo is in bad shape

Post by needmore »

Welcome to the forum and sorry about your freeze, it was an annual even for me in Indiana once upon a time. I'm not sure why they topped your bamboo unless the tops were brown, I doubt that it did any harm but it might not have been necessary, hopefully they did not cut off viable leaf buds. The feeding and compost will be helpful.

When bamboo gets too cold for a particular species - whatever temp that may be for that species, the first damage will show up as leaf burn. The burned leaves will turn a sage or a brown color, then drop off. Bamboo always has dormant leaf buds and part of the natural cycle is for the plant to drop leaves each year and replace them via these dormant buds so there are always new leaves in reserve. So you clearly have total leaf loss but maybe you have viable leaf buds still. That is very important as the plant can fire off those new leaves and start to create energy to recover and produce new culms, so hopefully they did not cut off branches with viable leaf buds on them.

The next layer of cold damage is those leaf buds can get frozen and will no longer be viable to push new leaves. At about the same time the culms will start to show damage starting at the top which is perhaps why they topped yours, but the culms will brown starting from the top & branch tips and that brown will move down culm as the freeze damage increases. If the culms retain some green but leafless they may have some limited capacity to produce energy for new culm growth.

You should expect new culms to emerge when conditions are right, the new culms though will very likely be much smaller than the existing ones as the energy reserves of the plant have been compromised and it is in survival mode, but unless your freeze was severe and prolonged you will get new albeit much smaller culms in a few weeks. It might take as much as 2 years for it to produce culms the size of the current ones to come up so be patient and expect that size down cycle. I see green culms still so yours should produce new culms. If yours leafs back out some that is even better. Any culms that turn tan/brown are dead and can be removed but I would consider leaving them as they can protect the tender new culms until those fully develop and then you can cull the brown ones. If the brown bothers you then go ahead and cut them out now but do not cut any green culms until well after they've had a chance to releaf.
Brad Salmon, zone 12B Kea'au, HI
http://www.needmorebamboo.com
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Glen
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Re: Please help-Bamboo is in bad shape

Post by Glen »

Everything Brad said is 100% correct.

At this point, it is too soon to assess the exact extent of the damage. I am south of Houston, and probably stayed a few degrees warmer than you, but most Bambusa textilis forms are showing signs of life in some branch buds. The more, the better!
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