Bamboo and Glyphosate

sarahTT

(This is a follow-up for https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/79214307 about bamboo shoots in an elderly neighbour's garden.)

So... we have just bought some "super strength" Glyphosate (360g/l?) for those shoots and I feel a bit stupid to have to ask again... but the label on the bottle is somewhat terrifying. It seems that the stuff works best when applied to the leafs but the shoots are not (yet) that big, just a few inches.

Second, they grow out of a nice green patch of lawn, the joy and pride of said lady, and I have a feeling that the stuff will kill off some of the lawn. She'd probably get over that but we want to minimise any such effect.

Also, the instructions on the bottle say that for ivy, one should cut a wedge into the stem and apply 2ml of the stuff NEAT with a paintbrush inside the stem. Would that work for bamboo rhizomes as well? Hubby thinks we should go for that and not bother with a weaker solution but I am not so sure as it's not so much a matter of speed but of length of exposure. Or so I think.

Again, sorry for having to ask but as this is not our garden, I want to be extra careful.

FreeBear

I've tried injecting weedkiller directly into the soft shoots of bamboo with a syringe & hypodermic needle. Doesn't kill the stuff.

Also tried spraying (with a drop of washing up liquid added). Singes the leaves a little, but still doesn't kill it.

The only really effective way is to dig it up. Fortunately, with a fairly fresh running shoot, it isn't too difficult. Start at the point where a shoot is emerging in the middle of a lawn/flowerbed. Shove a fork in and lift the soil gently, and with your hands, feel to see which direction the rhizome is running. Dig the root/rhizome up trying not to break it and leave bits behind.

Yes, it will make a bit of a mess of the lawn, but on the bright side, you only have to dig down a few inches. The stuff isn't deep rooting.

531063

Try a load of rock salt around it

Ectophile

531063 said:

Try a load of rock salt around it

And have a big dead patch in the lawn?

Ectophile

I have used the plastic bag trick on weeds in the past, but not on bamboo.  Shove the weeds into a bag.  Spray in the glyphosate, then seal up the neck of the bag, with the weeds and glyphosate inside.

But if it's only little shoots at the moment, you might be better off waiting until they are big enough to have leaves on.

Annemos

I had to finish off an evil Sweet Gum Tree (Liquidambar) that had subsided my bungalow. The Council did a bit of an attempt at plugging the stump with something. But next year several "beautiful" suckers were growing up of miniature Sweet Gum trees!

You can only imagine how my heart sank. A forest of them in the making! 

So Year 1 after removal, we saw that some suckers were coming out of extended woody runner roots. Brother-in-law drilled several holes into them and we poured the neat Tree Stump Round-up glyphosate into the holes. And painted all the leaves that we could see.

Year 2, three more suckers came up and again I painted the neat Tree Stump Roundup on the sucker leaves and on a couple more little woody roots I found. 

That finally got rid of the wretched thing! 


I had also had an ongoing problem for years, with this coming up in the garden, year after year. It did not matter what I did to try and pull it all out. (Kerria Japonica.) I used the rest of the Tree Round-up on the exposed cut stalk tips and it has never come back again. 

https://plantsam.com/kerria-japonica-pleniflora/


Good luck. You may need to be persistent for more that a year, perhaps? 

Annemos

https://www.progreen.co.uk/problem/bamboo

Found this with details. They suggest do it July to September.