Ed's Experiments and Stuff

I like to garden and this new house has a patch of bamboo so I figured why not make a trellis? So one day I headed out to the back yard, grabbed a few pieces of bamboo and started working. First thing learned - bamboo is very brittle especially old bamboo. I tried cutting it with various hand saws only to have it splinter all over the place. Hmm, finally I got out a hand saw with a very fine metal cutting blade. Perfect. Oh, and cutting close to a "knuckle" if you can limits the amount of splintering. Next came connecting the pieces. The first couple of sets of holes I could do on the drill press which worked nicely because, again the brittleness, I could go nice and slow and got decent holes with little splintering. It only worked for a couple sets of holes and then I couldn't make sure they were straight through both pieces of bamboo so I had to go with hand drill. Second thing learned - bamboo has a flat side where the stems come out so you can turn that side

It was 4 out of 6 actually and they made it to spring. It might have helped that spring came really early this year. They didn't get as much sun as I thought they would in front of the sliding glass door downstairs which is why I only got two cuttings from them all winter. Also, on closer inspection the stems got very weak so once the leaves got large the stems would collapse under the weight. I guess they need some air movement or to get bumped now and again to make the stems grow more sturdy. I took the second cutting and am now putting them outside to acclimate them before I plant them in the ground. The picture shows what they looked like just before the cutting.