I want to tell you about the day I proudly served my dinner guests what I was absolutely convinced was the purest, most beautifully filtered water they had ever tasted — only to watch my friend Karen hold her glass up to the light, squint, and ask, “Why is it… gray?” That was month one … Read more
I almost cried in my backyard. Not a little misty-eyed moment — I mean full-on, hands-on-knees, what-have-I-done despair. I had just spent $600 on bare-root bamboo plants, dug out a 40-foot privacy screen planting bed by hand over three weekends, and watched every single one of those plants sit there, sulk, and slowly yellow into … Read more
I once put a bamboo charcoal air purifying bag in my car to deal with a mysterious smell — and then completely forgot about it for three weeks. When I finally found it, it had migrated under the seat, split open slightly, and left a fine dusting of black charcoal across my beige floor mat. … Read more
The day the bamboo removal crew finally finished, I stood in my backyard and cried. Not happy tears — at least not yet. I was looking at what used to be a lush corner garden and seeing nothing but a moonscape of churned-up dirt, severed roots, and pale, compacted soil that looked like it hadn’t … Read more
I want to tell you about the afternoon I rented a stump grinder, confidently backed it toward my ex-bamboo grove, and promptly got it so thoroughly stuck in a tangle of rhizomes that I had to call my neighbor Carl — a retired electrician who knows nothing about bamboo — to help me wrestle it … Read more
The day I realized my neighbor was no longer speaking to me, it was because of bamboo. Specifically, the massive clump of golden bamboo I had planted along our shared fence line three years earlier — the clump that had quietly, relentlessly sent runners under the fence and was now erupting through her rose garden. … Read more
The morning I discovered my entire back fence line had disappeared under a wall of bamboo, I actually laughed — because what else do you do? Then I saw my vegetable garden. Or what used to be my vegetable garden. My neighbor’s bamboo had invaded my yard so completely that the raised beds I’d spent … Read more
I started my bamboo removal in winter because my neighbor’s dog kept using my yard as a bathroom, and I was convinced — completely, stubbornly convinced — that tearing out the bamboo hedge would somehow solve this. It would not. But what happened next accidentally taught me more about winter bamboo removal than any article … Read more
I want to tell you about the day I tried to dig up a small patch of bamboo in my backyard and ended up calling my neighbor at 9 PM covered in mud, holding a shovel I had somehow bent into an L-shape, and crying laughing. What started as a “quick Saturday project” turned into … Read more
I want to tell you about the afternoon I decided to dig out bamboo roots by hand using nothing but a standard garden trowel, a misplaced sense of confidence, and apparently zero understanding of what bamboo roots actually look like underground. Spoiler: the trowel snapped in half. My pride did not survive either. It started … Read more