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