What do pandas and gardening have in common?
You guessed it! Or maybe you didn’t… wait for it… bamboo!
We planted a few spindly-looking whisps on our tiny farm a few years ago, primarily to block out the neighbours from overlooking our deck. Or better yet, block out the neighbours from seeing us sip Mai Thai’s while pretending we are in a tropical paradise on our deck.
Several years later, neighbour-viewing has been adequately restricted. (Sadly the drinking of Mai Thai’s was similarly restricted by the having of children).
With lush leaves and tall strong stems literally growing on our doorstep, we’ve not been able to resist using this free, sustainable resource in our garden farm.
As our food and flower forest has taken shape, we’ve prioritised putting in our hard surfaces and framing pieces. One of which is the chicken run. It’s designed in a loop to allow the girls to wander through the forest and grab a nibble here and there without completely destroying the joint.
We had tons of chicken wire hanging around from the many, many chicken coop configurations we’ve built over the last 8 years but we needed a way of shaping our tunnel to allow just enough room for a foraging friend or two.
Enter bamboo! The stems are tall, come in a variety of widths and, most importantly, they bend like a circus contortionist.
It took only a little manoeuvring to thread them through the wire and drive them into the garden bed forming a not-quite-perfect chicken tunnel.
Next up, we were reliably informed by the interweb that our newly planted raspberries and blackberries would require a trellis. A trellis we had not but it wasn’t too much of a leap to see the trellis-potential in our new favourite gardening friend.
Finally, and maybe we were getting just a little creative-desperate here, but the peas really didn’t seem to like climbing the expensive textured metal stakes we’d lovingly hammered into the ground for their climbing pleasure. By contrast, a second row of peas is happily scaling the nearby rectangular steel climbing frame like Norgay on Everest.
We had plenty of smaller bamboo stems lying around from the previous two jobs which were easily able to be threaded through the stakes for the little pea tendrils to hang on to. It’s had the added benefit of strengthening the overall structure thanks to the alternate weaving patterns.
So there we are – three successful bamboo upcycled garden jobs done.
Must be time for a Mai Thai.