Morning Glories: Growing your own mg sticks, 1 by fchilders

fchilders wrote:
This is my wife Dee, holding a bamboo stick she used last year to stake up our mgs. We love having a grove of Bamboo for multiple reasons. One is in her hand. If you look close, you can still see last years vines around it. We scattered the seeds by the kitchen, and when they were up she went along shoving long straight sticks in the ground by groups of seedlings because she put so many sticks in the ground, they never turned into a tangle. They went up and stayed mostly on their own stick. Albeit some sticks had a half dozen vines on them. It is nice to know that no matter how many we use, they get replaced next year. When we clean them up, the waste always burns up like cardboard.

This is Japanese Black Bamboo, and we love it inspite of its drawbacks. Its major drawback is that the culms do not grow out of the top of the large root below. It grow horizontally out the side, and this causes it to swiven, and lie flat on the ground, even though it is 25 feet tall, when it snows. It is dynamic, and that is one of the reasons we love it. We can harvest without mercy and it springs right back again.

There are many many kinds available, and I plan this year to get some of the Arrow bamboo, that is about 3/4 " for about 10 feet. More in scale of my needs.
Frank