Bamboo really is a weed. I found this out a while ago while trying feebly to maintain our garden. You see, when our house was built it was also professionally landscaped. That would be great if we wanted to pay quite a small chunk of change to have little men come by every week and take care of it. But, alas, we would rather spend that money on other things like food. And wine.
Instead we try to maintain the garden ourselves. One of the decisions the landscapers made was to plant several kinds of exotic bamboo. Bamboo grows fast. So fast, if you stand still you can probably watch it grow. I mean it. Now, I admit, I’m getting older, and for old people, time moves very quickly. It’s possible that my opinion of fast-moving bamboo is just an artifact of my advanced age. Last week I put it to the test: There was a nice young shoot of bamboo just coming up in the kitchen window. I grabbed a post-it note, and wrote the date on it and stuck it to the window sill. I imagine that if I had kids I would probably do the same thing. In this case, I didn’t have to wait very long. Below is a picture of the bamboo, five days later. The bamboo has grown an astounding eighteen inches in five days: 3.6 inches a day. Now that’s fast.