Time for a Growing Challenge post, hosted by Melinda at One Green Generation.
Climbing beans and peas, tomatoes and other verticaly challenged productive plants need support, sometimes lots of it and at heights that can seem a little daunting to the home gardener. Enter the wonderful, magical plant of bamboo.
Bamboo solves a multitude of problems in our house and garden and when it came to planting out my beans and peas last week and constructing the supporting frames they will need to grow well, bamboo helped me out.
We have several stands of non invasive bamboo in our garden and every year my husband harvests canes from them in various lengths and stores them and we have a few deposit sites around the garden so they are ready when we need them for something.
Bamboo is incredibly hardy, very fast growing and strong yet flexible; an incredibly eco-friendly material. various sources report that after atomic bombs were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki, bamboo was only minimally damaged. Now im not suggesting that you need atomic proof materials in your vege garden, but you get my point. its hardy, and makes a perfect living investment for the home gardener. We have food, shelter, wind breaks, privacy, trellis and support material, tomato stakes, banner poles, cubby and tent poles, easy to make and hang japanese style wall hooks, you name it, all at hand and ready to harvest whenever we need it.
So in about an hour i had 'woven' a very strong, wind resistant and flexible matrix trellising structure for my peas and some teepee style supports for the climbing beans and bush peas.
Its an endless resource. Not sure how you spin it tho'. Grin.
5 comments:
We had bamboo all over our yard in Northern California last year - I LOVED it... and now I MISS IT!! Wonderful stuff. And that is an amazing and elaborate trellis! Wow! What types of peas and peas will you be growing on them? So exciting!
What type of bamboo have you got growing Kel? I have been thinking of ripping out one of my (useless) palms and replacing it with a non-invasive bamboo for exactly that reason. Yours looks pretty tall though, I gather they get to 10m or more?
Hey Kel, that trellis is a work of art! It is fantastic that you have such a flexable building material growing in your back yard. What type of bamboo is it? I have a spot in my yard just calling out for it.
Gav
its agreat idea, the sound the leaves make in the breeze is really lovely too but im afraid we dont know what kind it is; polyiold , polpodol...nah, we dunno! it spretty tall but they come in all sizes. a nurseryperson/bamboo specialist will advise!
cool. i like the look and sound of bamboo as well. :)
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