Bamboo

The tops of my bamboo plant start to glow just after sunrise. This year three new culms came up, and they are beginning to send out their canopy branches. Bamboo sends out branches out in the winter to provide shade for the next crop of shoots, which grow like crazy in the spring and summer. By spring the canopy will be thick. Next year we may have six or seven new shoots, and they should go even higher (these guys are about 30 feet tall).

These are the giant Bambusa Oldhamii. only two years old now and already a major player in the back yard. Big, fat culms with a nice, glossy green finish.

Bamboo is a social plant. It likes to raise its offspring very close by. Trees, by contrast, like lots of space and are not particular fond of their own children, much less human beings (though I still am fond of them). But Bamboo is no push-over. Like every other foolish organism on earth, it intends to control the world .


As you can see, Willow can barely hide her contempt for the bamboo. She has no interest at all in helping with the yard (except for some random fertilizing), which I believe is a fairly self-centered attitude. Now that we are on hiatus from projects in the house, she assumes that it is my sole job to play Frisbee with her. I suppose I should be thankful she is not digging around the bamboo, yet.

I still am at odds with the Sri Lankan biobots that are chewing up my Turk's cap (and that threaten civilization). The CIA technique for handling this global threat is to place an umbrella upside down under the plant and shake the leaves, then dispose of biobots appropriately. Boy, I feel safer now. I've also learned about a band of vigilantes somewhere in the south who are intimidating the biobots by screaming at them, but that just sounds nutty.

I'm considering a new philosophy for the yard. For now, if the biobots only chew on the leaves and don't chew up the Turk's cap flowers, I will give them a pass. To be honest, I am beginning to be a little afraid of them. They seem to notice me now, which is not good.