It’s Up to You

Aloha.  It feels like winter has finally arrived.  The length of the days is shrinking and the rains are back for now.  The shooting of the bamboo has been slightly postponed from the dry conditions that we had been experiencing.  WIth the recent blessings of rain, the shooting process will take off again.  In the meantime, we have been working diligently to finish our bamboo treatment/processing shed.  We have one more concrete pour to do on Tuesday before we will start construction on the end walls.  We have also been working in the nursery propagating bamboo and cleaning plants for off island sales.  All plants leaving Maui for the other islands need to be free of scale, mites, ants, and other pests to curtail their spread throughout the islands.  Sometimes the plants have all their leaves clipped off prior to shipping.  This is no problem as the bamboo leafs out quickly within 10-14 days to its original fullness.  We are very pleased to see sales pick up again.  Please help me make the your blogging experience better by telling me what you’d like to hear about.

Chipping

Some readers have asked why we chip rather than harvest the cut culms for other uses. Right now we’re working to grow clumps of bamboo for future harvesting, and many of the clumping bamboos can get crowded in their first few years of growth. We remove culms from the inner sections of the clumps to promote straighter growth of the next generation of bamboo. Straighter bamboo culms are much easier to use for construction, and nearly all of our tropical clumping bamboos are grown for building materials.

The culms that we remove aren’t mature enough for construction use, as the ideal age for building bamboo is around five years. We chip the young culms and add them back into the bamboo groves, since they make perfect compost for the culms that we’re growing for  harvest.