Bamboo: The Most Versatile Grass In The World. Photo by Green Deane
Bambusa
Do not tell me you don’t live near bamboo. I grew up in 50-below-zero Maine and we had bamboo in front of the house for decades. In fact, the cooler the climate the bamboo comes from the better tasting are its shoots.
There are over 100 edible species of bamboo, and perhaps nearly all of the shoots of 1500-plus species are edible. No one really knows for sure. Most of them, even the edible ones, are bitter raw and that bitterness can vary. A few have some or no bitterness. Usually cooking the shoots in one or more changes of water reduces or gets rid of that bitterness. To prepare them remove the protective sheath, slice and boil, or chop and boil, or just boil. Incidentally, the size of the dentrocalamus shoot when it comes out of the ground will be the diameter it will be when full grown.
Bamboo shoot
Actually there tends to be two kinds of bamboo, clumpers and runnners. Clumpers tend to be tropical and runners tend to be temperate. The temperate Phyllostachys bamboos are a leading source of shoots, among them Phyllostachys nuda, P. platyglossa, P. nidularia, P. hindsii, P. dulcis, and P. vivax. Other temperate bamboos are Semiarundinaria fastuosa and Qiongzhuea tumidissinoda. The most common shoots harvested for food in China are P. heterocycla f. pubescens, P. praecox, P. dulcis and P. iridescens.
The following may seem worth knowing but really isn’t: The seed grain of the flowering bamboo is also edible. Boil the seeds like rice or pulverize them, mix with water, and make into cakes. Why isn’t that good to know? The bamboo, depending on the species, flowers only once every 7 to 120 years.
The bamboo, which is really a grass, is so useful several books could be written about it and have. It’s food and building material. Without it several million people could not get by. It is probably only second to the palm in usefulness, or may even exceed palms. However, in many parts of the world it has become an invasive weed, Australia is a good example. It’s banned there in many places. The genus name, Bambusa, comes from the Malayan name for the plant.
Other Uses: Bamboo is used to build structures or to make containers (one section alone can carry water or serve as cooking pot. ) It also makes ladles, spoons, and various other cooking utensils. Bamboo is used to make tools, weapons, even a friction fire saw. You can make a strong bow by splitting the bamboo and putting several pieces together. Through technology, it is also made into plywood, composite beams and paper. You can also wrap food in the leaves.
When I shopped around for bamboo for my backyard (Phyllostachys viridis) I specifically bought one that was mild enough to eat raw, but I don’t make it a habit of it and here’s why. Most foraging books and various websites fail to mention that bamboo shoots have a cyanogenic glycoside, specifically taxiphyllin which is mostly responsible for the bitter taste. In your gut that can change to hydrogen cyanid also called prussic acid. Not good. However, taxiphyllin degrades readily in boiling water so I recommend boiling any bamboo shoots you try. And if you cannot boil the bitterness out, don’t eat it.
The only problem I had raising the bamboo is that it took a few years for the stand to get established. It spent a lot of time sending up underground runners, but when it did sprout, it grew incredibly fast. Indeed, it is the fastest growing renewable resource known to man. Some can grow four feet a day. Here are a few of the more desirable edible species:
Bambusa multiplex, one of the hardiest clumping bamboos often used for a hedge or windbreak. Bambusa oldhamii , another clumping bamboo with straight stems, also used for hedges and windbreaks. Bambusa tuidoides ‘Ventricosa’ also called Buddha’s Belly. It has pot belly type internodes. It’s a clumping bamboo or can be grown in a pot.
Bambusa Vuigaris ‘Vittata’ the Painted Bamboo, has golden stems with green stripes that vary in width. It can be grown in a pot indoors. Phyllostachys edulis, Moso, the largest of the hardy bamboos. It makes a hedge or windbreak and is used in bamboo crafts. Phyllostachys vivax, has stems with thin walls and white powdery bands below the nodes. It is cold hardy. Phyllostachys atrovaginata, edible raw, little bite, cold hardy. Makes a good hedge or windbreak. Phyllostachys nidularia, also edible raw, makes a good hedge or windbreak, cold hardy. Phyllostachys rubromarginata, high cold tolerance, good eating quality, can be used for hedge or windbreak or in bamboo craft.
Lastly, bamboo is tough. One stand was at ground zero at the 1945 Herioshima atomic blast. Within days it sent up new shoots.
With 70 genera and 1,575 species it is difficult to identify. Stems have nodes that are hollow in between. Growth is columnar. No branches first year, can grow up to 39 inches a day.
Pictured above is “Emerald Bamboo” or Bambusa textilis mutabilis, growing happily in Leu Gardens in Orlando, Florida.
Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile
TIME OF YEAR:
Seasonal and year round depending upon climate
ENVIRONMENT:
Bamboo can be found from cold mountains to hot deserts.
METHOD OF PREPARATION:
Many bamboo shoots have to be cooked to rid them of cyanide. The sap and shoots can be fermented. Pith of young shoots can be pickled. The seeds are edible but some bamboos only flower once every 120 years.
I have often wondered why they don’t start planting desserts; at their edges or location of water; to get it to spread, and start a greater draw of rain, which to plant should. Espedially Equatorial areas.
Does anyone know where one could find a graph of the family tree of species of Bamboo?
I live in the Mojave. Why would we want bamboo to spread. It would wreak havoc on the ecosystem, there is a very fine balance out here of flora and fauna. Introducing an invasive species of flora not native to the area would destroy native flora and the fauna that feeds on it, and those that feed on the herbivores. While I like bamboo to do crafts with and possibly eat, I wouldn’t want to destroy an entire ecosystem with it.
An important consideration, but much of what is now desert – which is defined as a region where evaporation exceeds rainfall – was made that way by human activity within the past few thousand years, or less.
Deserts in many parts of the world are spreading, in some cases perhaps due to natural shifts in weather patterns, but in most instances it is pretty clear that humans not fully understanding how to live as an integral part of the ecosystems which sustain us is the root cause. The once Fertile Crescent, considered to be the cradle of civilization, is a classic example. Regreening those regions, if done in an ecologically sound manner, is really reclaimation of a badly damaged environment, not unlike the reclaimation of land that has been strip-mined.
In fact, extractive agriculture, which is believed to have begun in this region, is compared to mining, as the nutrients built by the interaction of organisms that created the fertile soils are essentially ‘mined’ by agricultural practices that ignore the natural biological processes which would otherwise sustain, renew, and build soil fertility perpetually. The deep topsoils of the American mid-west are not being mined in this fashion.
Geoff Lawton has been successful in helping people to regreen portions of the desert in the Fertile Crescent area, while meeting their need for food, as featured in videos available on YouTube.
OK, I don’t live near any bamboo…
Well, you said not to tell you that…. 😛
You didn’t mention some of the finest fly fishing poles are made of bamboo, and they were also some of the cheapest fishing rods our grandparents used. One piece or two (or more), they were sturdy, light weight, and flexible.
In Florida you can fish in the country of your residence without a license if you use a bamboo poll without a reel.
Did you mean ‘county’, and ‘pole’?
Personally, I would find it challenging to fish with my poll.
Yes, and oddly I can’t change that post… Inside the program I can get back to the post before it…
In my recent post about bamboo shoots (http://botanistinthekitchen.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/bamboo-shoots-the-facts-about-bracts-part-3/) I speculated that I harvested Phyllostachys. Great to get know that I was probably right! Love your blog!
Thanks for this post! We have oldhamii in the backyard and recently harvested our first stalk. Can’t wait to try it!
Just letting you know that Bamboo is allowed in Australia. We have been growing Clumping Bamboo in East Gippsland in Victoria for 3 years. “BriagBamboo”. It is becoming very popular. Australians are getting excited about growing edible bamboo in their back yards along with their vegies.
Hi Deane,
I recently tried a bite (very small) of raw bamboo. The bitterness caused me to spit it out immediately and my husband said, “You better be careful. What if it’s like cassava root and must be cooked to get rid of cyanide or something?) That caused me to go up on the internet. Lo and behold, my research indicated raw bamboo is full of cyanide and toxic and/or and deadly. What are your thoughts? I’m confused, I thought if pandas ate it by the bucketful, it must be good. Thank you for your great website and newsletters. V.
What animals can eat and what we can eat (and vice versa) is often quite different. Squirrels, which we can eat, can eat stuff that would kill is in minutes. And we eat things that can kill them thus there are no rules other than finding out what we humans can or cannot eat.
We just cut down a LOT of bamboo.
Is there anyone that can use it?
Where is your bamboo? What kind is it? Can you tell me a little about it?
Interesting article! I am a spinner (I like making yarn) and I was just curious if you know if the type of bamboo that grows as a “weed” in the Midwest can be processed for spinning? (Sorry I don’t know the species but it grows in my friend’s yard by the boatload… maybe I could upload a photo.)
I want to learn how to process bamboo for spinning but I’m having a hard time finding resources online. Maybe I’m using the wrong search terms…. any help much appreciated! 🙂
-Kate
Hi Kate – That’s an interesting question. If you find the information on how to process bamboo for spinnable fiber, it would be nice to see it posted here.
Lacking any other information, one could experiment with methods used to process other bast fibers, like flax, or the bark of trees like basswood (aka linden). Of course, bamboo is far ‘woodier’ than most other plants used for their fiber, (at least once the bark is stripped from a basswood tree).
Apparently nearly all of the bamboo fiber made into clothing and other textiles is actually a viscose fiber – like rayon. The cellulose in the bamboo, or in the case of rayon, trees, is chemically disassembled and them reassembled into long chains or fibers. This chemically-intensive process is not very environmentally friendly, in spite of the massive advertising campaigns claiming that virtue. Bamboo viscose has a bit less impact on the environment only because bamboo grows faster than trees… which is something, at least.
Of all the synthetic fibers, we find the viscose fabrics to be the most comfortable to wear, probably because they are not simply ‘plastic’, like every other man-made fiber. However, the manufacture of the viscose fabrics may produce similar amounts of toxic pollution.
If you can find a way to separate the fibers in the bamboo canes, aka ‘culms’, through retting perhaps, no chemicals would be necessary, but the texture of those fibers is likely to resemble linen more than the viscose bamboo fabrics typically sold in stores.
Good luck!
How about eating leaves, fresh or pulverized?
Obviously, I am not Green Deane, but the problem with trying to eat bamboo leaves, I imagine, would be the same as trying to eat your lawn: humans aren’t designed to eat grass, and bamboo is a grass.
Assuming your yard hasn’t been poisoned with chemicals, the grass in your yard is simply too fiberous for humans to digest. Herbivores, the true vegetarians, typically regurgitate, re-chew, swallow again, and ferment their food in a chamber of their digestive tract known as the rumen, aka the ‘first stomach’. Or, like rabbits, they have other tactics, such as consuming their ‘night pellets’, to enable them to digest coarse vegetation.
Most leafy garden vegetables, and most domestic vegetables in general, have been selected over many hundreds of years to be more tender and less bitter than their wild ancestors. Wild lettuce, as you may know, is bitter – which is why it is said to have originally been used as a pot herb, which means it was cooked, and not generally eaten raw.
Even cooked, even young tender grasses are not likely to be either appealing nor nutritious, whether from grasses bred to be a few inches high, or those which naturally grow to heights we normally think only trees achieve.
Where can one obtain edible bamboo seeds? Does anyone know how long it takes to grow it from seed? Thanks.
“Clumpers tend to be topical and runners tend to be temperate. ”
Don’t you mean “tropical”?
Yes, I changed it. Thanks.
Hi! Hey I was curious, you said that you lived in Maine and had bamboo growing where you live (survived minus 50 degrees??)?
Also, I have some bamboo, but whenever it shoots up, early on if I take the new shoots and take the papery stuff off, it’s mostly leaves that haven’t grown yet. Not much ‘shoot’ at all. I’m used to the bamboo shoots in a can, are the ones you eat different than those?
Thanks for any information! 😀
Yes we had bamboo in Maine and got it from our neighbors who had a big patch of it. There’s a wide variety of bamboo, and a certain amount of edible species. A lot if not most bamboo shoots have some cyanide which is why it has to be cooked.
Have 25 ft tall bamboo and chickens in Los Angeles. Chickens love piles of leaves (react like children to a piñata popping). Are they poisonous to chickens or to other plants when used as mulch?The girls shred them.
Is bamboo toxic to horses?
That’s a good question. Horses and bamboo tend to be in different places. But bamboo can have some cyanide in it, varying from species to species. This is why it is often cooked and not eaten raw. I don’t know if horses would eat bamboo or not. I would be cautious.
Dianne, I wouldn’t let horses or cattle eat bamboo. Up here in Ohio we have wild cherry trees, and the farmers cut them down whenever they spring up because they poison their livestock via cyanide.
Why cut them down why not dig it up put it in a pot and sell it? I know lots of people who would pay for wild cherry trees heck I would pay for one or two myself