Bamboo!

[jetsam]

So I am putting up some bamboo to dry. Never done it before, don't know anything about it, and it seemed like it'd be a bit of a shame to let all that wood rot.

Here's what I've learned so far:

• Bamboo is an absolute PITA to get rid of.
• Bamboo is mostly air. A cord of that stuff is not going to go far.
• Bamboo's segmented nature creates the potential for a glass-breaking explosion when a sealed chamber heats up and bursts.
• Relatedly, chopping a vent hole in your sticks every 8 or 12 inches is also a PITA after the first couple hundred times.
• You wouldn't think so to look at it, but you can in fact get a bamboo splinter and they are long pointy bastards and no fun to get under your fingernail.
• "Limbing" bamboo is best done with a sharp knife or machete. Fresh green stuff cleans up easily; dead brown stuff takes some hacking.
• Dropping a gnarly elm tree and processing it is easier than clearing bamboo and processing it. If you know elm, you know that these are strong words. At least you eventually get some decent firewood out of the elm, though.
• Chainsaws make terrible rototillers. Don't try it, even if your bamboo tempts you.

SO not a great start there. Here's what pointers I have for you after a half day of this pointless activity:

• It might seem like a great idea to flush cut the stalks and be done with it. Having actually ruined a stumping chain pursuing this theory, I can tell you that it's not a great idea. (How can you ruin a stumping chain, you ask? Isn't a stumping chain just a regular chain that was already ruined? Read on.) If you cut them as flush as possible the stabby little bastards will punish you every time you walk across the area. If you go into the dirt after all those little buggers, your stumping blade will quickly sieze up, grind down, and get little rocks in every joint. I actually threw a chain that was tightened correctly because several joints in the chain locked up hard.
• The best thing I found was to cut them about waist high so you can see them instead of stepping on them, then use a pickaxe to chop them off below ground level. This is even less fun than it sounds due to the root system being hard woody stuff that may require you to go around the perimeter with 3 or 6 whacks for one big cane.
• Lay out a long piece of rope and drop the bamboo onto the rope. Drag it so it's all sort of in the same direction, then use the rope to pull it and tie it into one big bundle. Then break out the saw and buck the whole bundle together.
• All the leafy branches are on the skinniest parts of the bamboo. Buck and keep the bottom parts, drag the top parts into a good spot for a bonfire and let them dry there. You can just dump them in the woods but it takes years for the canes to break down.
• It's a lot of work for a small amount of hollow firewood. Only recommended for those who are clearing bamboo anyway.

Behold an afternoon's work. (Note that at least 75% of the time used was for chopping up roots with the pickaxe, and most of the rest was dragging leafy tops off into the woods. Actually cutting up the remaining canes was pretty fast.

Yeah, that ought to keep the house warm for a week in fall, or a day in winter.

I would say it was a waste of time, but I'd have been out there with the pickaxe eradicating bamboo either way, so I guess it's good that I got some kindling out of it.

 

[mar13]

And that it's actually a grass, not a tree, also tells you that trying to make it work for a wood stove is going to be a battle.

Maybe get a pet panda.

 

[Kevin Weis]

Has been declared a noxious weed in Maryland. Not allowed to propagate it here anymore.

 

[bfitz3]

Sometime ago, I read an article on using giant miscanthus (grass) in a woodstove. As it some time ago, so take this with a grain of salt... Miscanthus has has a relatively high level of chlorine in it which will corrode the heck out of your firebox and destroy your catalyst if you have one. Perhaps it wasn’t chlorine? Regardless, the conclusion was that burning grass in a stove is a bad idea unless the stove is built for it.

I’d proceed with great caution on the bamboo!

 

[JimBear]

Did you at least save enough to make a couple of bamboo fishing poles? At least you would of been able to enjoy the fruits of your labor for years to come while drowning a few worms. Even if you don’t like fishing you could hang the poles on the wall of your garage as a reminder of what a PITA bamboo is & occasionally lob a few obscenities at them as you walk by.

 

[GadDummit]

Wow, that's some labor right there! I wonder, since it's just a (demon) grass, if you could liberally spray it with Roundup and have it all die on you to keep it from coming back?

 

[jetsam]

Did you at least save enough to make a couple of bamboo fishing poles? At least you would of been able to enjoy the fruits of your labor for years to come while drowning a few worms. Even if you don’t like fishing you could hang the poles on the wall of your garage as a reminder of what a PITA bamboo is & occasionally lob a few obscenities at them as you walk by.

There's plenty of un-eradicated bamboo left standing for that. I do use bamboo for whatever I want a pole for. I cut a couple for my canoe every year, use 'em when the water is too shallow for paddling. Many of my woodpiles have bamboo uprights, too.

Wow, that's some labor right there! I wonder, since it's just a (demon) grass, if you could liberally spray it with Roundup and have it all die on you to keep it from coming back?

There's enough cancer in my family without me going out of my way to get some. I suspect that stuff would also kill my bees!

Always makes me shake my head when I see people putting gallons of poison on their lawn to make it look like everyone else's lawn.

From what I've read, after the initial eradication you can keep up on it with a lawnmower after that.

 

[gabenson]

You can make a bamboo raft although they look small.

 

[SpaceBus]

I would love to plant some bamboo, but we worry about what might happen after we die.

 

[PaulOinMA]

Looks like you're getting ready to make a Vietnam-era punji trap to protect your house.

 

[SpaceBus]

Looks like you're getting ready to make a Vietnam-era punji trap to protect your house.

Tiger traps are quite effective.

 

[jetsam]

Looks like you're getting ready to make a Vietnam-era punji trap to protect your house.

I estimate a 0.00001% chance that burglars would fall into my pit, and a 90% chance that I would eventually fall into my pit. Plus a significant chance that the UPS guy would fall into my pit, and we can't have that. Who would bring my stuff??

 

[Simonkenton]

Bamboo is no good for wood stoves. This is why there are virtually no wood stoves in Vietnam, or in Thailand.

 

[SpaceBus]

Bamboo is no good for wood stoves. This is why there are virtually no wood stoves in Vietnam, or in Thailand.

I don't think it's because of the bamboo, but I agree that it has no place in a stove. Fun for bonfires though.

 

[jetsam]

Bamboo is no good for wood stoves. This is why there are virtually no wood stoves in Vietnam, or in Thailand.

I don't see any reason that it would be bad for stoves, aside from the built in pressure bomb every 10 inches. That can be resolved by cutting or smashing each segment.

On the other hand, the BTUs per cord have got to be amazingly low because it's mostly air, and it is a mess of work to get a small amount of wood, so I'm not about to argue that it's a good fuel in terms of btu by volume, or btus per labor hour.

An afternoon of processing oak can get me a cold week's worth of fuel, or maybe a month's worth if all I have to do is buck/split/stack it.

 

[Simonkenton]

The other reason for lack of wood stoves in Thailand is, lowest temp ever recorded is 76 degrees. Cold winter night in Bangkok.

 

[Dix]

Pot some up... I'll take some. Or I'll come pot it up !

Seriously.

 

[EODMSgt]

Can't say I ever thought about wood stoves when I was in Vietnam or Thailand. I did use some bamboo to cook bats in the Philippines though.

 

[blades]

best way to get rid of Bamboo - front end loader or back hoe and a dump truck.

 

[Kevin Weis]

A co-worker this spring had to use a backhoe to get it eradicated at the end two years trying with Round-up and mowing. So yea, the backhoe. BTW you will need a load of replacement soil.

 

[jetsam]

I have a friend who paid to have his bamboo bulldozed. He said 5 years later it was worse than when he started! Apparently you need to go down 2-3 feet to really clear it out.

 

[jetsam]

Pot some up... I'll take some. Or I'll come pot it up !

Seriously.

I cut more down yesterday! I've been throwing a lot of it down the hill into the woods. It's a lot of work for a very small amount of wood.

It is great when you need a pole for something, though!

 

[blades]

Only thing worse than bamboo are those dang Orange and white barrels that keep popping up all over the roads. Buckthorn is a close second though.

 

[Kevin Weis]

I have a friend who paid to have his bamboo bulldozed. He said 5 years later it was worse than when he started! Apparently you need to go down 2-3 feet to really clear it out.

Yep, dig it out with the back hoe. You need to get near every bit of root.

 

[jetsam]

So now I am burning this bamboo I put up this summer.

Observations:

It has its own odor, both as wood and as smoke.

It is mostly air, but makes an okay warm-up-the-stove load in the fall.

If you have a bk on low, you can get 8 hours out of a load.

It is WAY more work than it's worth. I could have processed 10x the volume and 100x the mass in pine or oak in the same time.

It is annoying to have to smash/cut/drill it between every segment to avoid bamboo explosions in the stove.

If you had a giant machine to smash dried bamboo into strips and bind the strips into logs, the btu content would probably be pretty high.

Overall: not worth it unless you just want try it out. Throw it down the hill and spend the afternoon finding some pine or oak instead. But if all you had was bamboo, you could heat with it.