Transcript from video:

Eme: Taking video of me peeling my bamboo shoots?

Courtney Brooke: Yeah what are you doing Esme?

Esme: Peeling a bamboo shoot!

Courtney Brooke: What are you gonna do with that bamboo shoot?

Esme: Eat it!

Courtney Brooke: What? You can eat bamboo shoots?

Esme: Yes!

Courtney Brooke: You can eat just all the bamboo shoots any different kind?

Esme: No you can’t eat the furry ones when the bamboo is like furry.

Courtney Brooke: Oh you can only eat the ones that don’t have fur?

Esme: Uh huh.

Courtney Brooke: Yep.

Esme: They’re always really furry like this inside.

Courtney Brooke: Let’s see?

Esme: They’re furry like this inside.

Courtney Brooke: I can’t quite see the furry, let me see?

Esme: They’re furry like this inside.

Courtney Brooke: Oh year, like little fuzz.

Esme: Uh huh, their fuz. Then you peel them and then you cook them fry them and then you can eat them.  And you peel the outside layers off…. but you see this?

Courtney Brooke: Yeah.

Esme: That’s what we want to peel off.

Courtney Brooke: Ah, Okay so then we just eat like the heart of it like the core.

Esme: Yeah, you only eat the core.

Courtney Brooke: Cool.

The post Eating Bamboo Shoots with Esme at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Previous owners gifted Earthaven’s main street with a healthy stand of bamboo that’s now prolific near the Forest Garden Learning Center. Early Earthaven members added additional stands around the community.

What a beautiful and useful plant (we thought)!

Bamboo IS beautiful. AND useful. But like a beautiful and useful animal, bamboo has to be trained and maintained. Otherwise, despite one’s love for it, IT WILL TAKE OVER!

We had the naïve idea that if bamboo is planted between natural “barriers,” such as creeks and roads, you don’t have to worry about its invasiveness. Think again. Bamboo spreads, like any grass, in every direction through networks of rhizomes and root mats. Although it may be stopped by a road bed or other deep boundary it’s definitely hard to control. If it gets close to a road, come heavy snow and ice, it will lean down frozen and stiff and block traffic.

Excavation to remove Bamboo from the Bellavia pond.

One year, we tried making eating bamboo shoots an incentive to control one stand, but the thrill of eating them didn’t seem to justify all the effort to prepare them. This year, encroachment on a building became too risky to ignore, and a major excavation was undertaken. It will take several years of pruning as new sprouts emerge before we can consider the job done.

Now all neighborhoods and the commons are being managed for bamboo to stop its spread. Harvests are providing material for future decorative and useful experiments.

The post Lessons in Bamboo: Love it but Don’t Leave it Alone appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.