Tag: bamboo

Quote of the Day, Dear GOD But I Still Hate Bamboo edition.

Haven’t changed that opinion since 2009, either.  Anyway, I came across a slightly despairing passage from 2011: in case you weren’t aware, golden bamboo is an invasive species in Maryland, because some idiots thought that it’d look awesome here right next to the native bamboo (which has the elementary politeness to regulate itself). The problem?

There are no known biological controls for bamboo, unless you count the Giant panda. Certain spider mites feed on bamboo leaves but they do not cause extensive damage. Pandas on the other hand, actively eat the leaves and tender shoots of bamboo, and in fact bamboo makes up 95% of their diet. Since adult pandas eat about 20-30 pounds of bamboo per day, a pair would make short work of an infested area. Pandas are however, notoriously scarce, with only about 1,000 found in the wilds of central China and another 200 or so in zoos throughout the world. So don’t look for anyone offering their services.

On the bright side, there may be a solution here: genetic engineering. If we could get our hands on enough panda DNA, we could bootleg the species and release it into the wild (after tweaking its collective suicide wish, slightly). Of course, once they eat all the bamboo they’re kind of stuck, but I figure that if we also make them tasty that would be a self-correcting problem. Certainly the coywolves wouldn’t object…

Wow. I have definite opinions about animals, huh?

Bamboo. :Trembling hands: Effing. Bam. Boo.

There are two types of people in the world: people who have never had to deal with bamboo on their property, and lucky people. You can tell the first because their reaction to this (via Instapundit):

Can American Farms Make Bamboo the Next Big Cash Crop?

Could the Mississippi Delta become America’s bamboo belt, the breadbasket of a new class of homegrown structural building components? Earlier this June in Greenville, Miss., a group of engineers, manufacturers, bureaucrats and farmers gathered to discuss how land formerly cultivated for cotton might be converted to produce bamboo on a massive scale. Teragren, the world’s largest bamboo building products manufacturer, has engineered new structural joists made of imported Moso, a bamboo species with the tensile strength of steel. Teragren VP Tom Goodham says a domestic Moso source is the key to renewable structural timber becoming mainstream and affordable: “The whole bamboo building-products category is just on the cusp of critical mass.”

…was probably the same as mine: a slow-motion scream of “NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO” and an instinctive look around for a flamethrower. Trust me. Don’t plant bamboo.

Don’t plant bamboo.

We once had to clean out an old infestation of the stuff, which survived weed killers, herbicides, other chemicals*, machetes, power saws, and plowing up the ground and sowing it with salt. Yes, we actually salted the earth. It didn’t work. We eventually got it under control by hacking away everything above ground level, laying down a tarp, covering it with half a ton of rocks – and then spent the next couple of years hunting down and cutting away every shoot that penetrated the covering. I warned the guy who bought the place from us about the bamboo; I don’t think that he was listening. I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t about to go back.

Don’t plant bamboo.

Moe Lane

*Which did not include Agent Orange, but only because I didn’t have any.

Also, this movie is a total lie. They get really intense about people having pandas without the right forms.

[UPDATE]: Vladimir in comments reminds me that this is not the first time that I have fulminated about the Demon Bamboo.