Bamboo For The Masses

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The time of the year has come for new bamboo shoots to emerge from the root mass and grow forty feet tall. I've found three spouting out of the ground so far. There might be more, but they're hard to find in among the dead leaves and limbs on the forest floor. I'll know in a week or so. There may not be any more than three come up. That's the same number of bamboo plants I had come up last year.

Frankly, I don't know what the deal is with how bamboo propagates. When I first talked about planting them in the corner of my yard, my younger brother became truly concerned and swore that if I planted them they would take over all my property and my house. They haven't.

In fact, it took about five years for the first couple of bamboo shoots to grow at all, and in the last five years only about twenty altogether have appeared, and most of those died of their own accord or got killed by a fire forest fire I deliberately set to burn off the underbrush each winter.

It was just a small burn-off fire whose flames hardly ever reached a height of six inches, and it didn't kill much of the underbrush it was started for in order to open up the woods a little and kill off the ticks and redbugs so I could take a stroll there without getting eat up. It killed the bamboo though. Including the largest stalk yet. About 4-6 inches in diameter.

My red azalea bushes are blazing with new blossoms. The bushes were some commercial plants I put out over ten years ago. They've been very productive from the getgo. In a long row on the western side of the lawn around my house I planted some other azalea bushes that took a long time to start putting out blossoms.

This row of azaleas are mostly a pink and white variegated color and don't blossom until a couple of weeks later than the original plants with the red blossoms show up. at the northern end of that row are some miniature azalea plants that have pure white blossoms.

All the plants in that row were "rescued" from a commercial planting venture on my younger brother's property several hundred yards away that he rented out to the grower. They were potted and set under the pine trees on that property to shade them from too much sun when they're small cuttings.

The whole lot of them were killed back by a late hard frost such that they didn't have any commercial value. I asked the grower if I could have a few of them to see if they might come back over time. He told me I could have any or all of them. He was quite disgusted over his financial loss. No blame.

I took about 30-40 of them out of the pots and buried them in a row along the edge of my lawn and forgot about them for the most part. They didn't exactly die, but they didn't grow, and they only put out a few blossom over the next five years or so.

It was during the winter when a lot of the underbrush in the woods beyond the edge of my lawn had shed their leaves that I began to notice new shoots coming out of the ground of those frost-killed plants, and it was those new growth shoots that eventually began putting out blossoms. None of the original branches ever did much. Now, those plants are five foot tall bushes and seem to have more blossoms every year.

My old fig tree has completely leaved out and even has small berries growing. I've seen these early fruit happen before. It's exciting to see them and imagine having fresh figs earlier than usual. But these early fruits hardly ever mature. They turn pale green and fall off. That's when the real fruit begin to appear that will get ripe and BE delicious. '-)

The commercially grown fig bush I planted about three or maybe four seasons ago is still trying to grow up and be a real little boy. It's only been putting out a couple of leaves each summer, and then the small shoots it puts up that never get over a foot tall, have died back each winter. Then, in the spring, the plant would have to grow a new shoot even to grow leaves on.

This past fall I decided to cover the one puny little live branch the root system sent up as a token effort to reproduce itself with a pile of dead leaves to protect it from the winter frosts. The idea was that if I could at least keep that one little limb alive over the winter it wouldn't have to regrow the branch before it started growing leaves.

My ploy worked, at least to some degree. A week or so ago I raked the dead leaves away to find out if the little branch had survived the winter, and saw two tiny little green buds toward the top of the plant. It was alive. If it could get those two little buds to grow from early on in the season it might be able to grow some more branches with even more leaves, and more leaves might help the root mass grow big enough to support a strong, mature, blossoming fruit tree.

I've been checking to see if those little green buds would grow. They haven't really developed much, but now there is a third tiny green bud at the node below the other buds. I'm cautiously delighted.
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