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Runner bamboo - how to stop it
roystairmand
Posts: 1
I have a running bamboo that has been in for about 6 years that borders a gravel seating area. It is about three metres long and a metre wide. It’s wonderful and we love it… BUT it's now sending runners two metres into the seating area. Cutting them, of course is only temporary and about a fortnight later there are more shoots sprouting!
I didn’t put in any barrier at the beginning. Can I spray Roundup on the runner leaves to kill them without killing the main plant? If that is not a solution how do I stop the runners… running? Thank You.
0
Posts
The only way to get rid of the runners is to trace them back to the parent plant and them remove them entirely. Once that is done you need to install some form of barrier to stop them escaping again. It's both time consuming and hard work, but the only practical way.
The runners don't generally run very deep.
We did what DR suggests but we used old slates. You need enough depth - bamboo doesn't go very deep but I should think 12 to 18 inches would be a minimum. Anyway, it worked a treat and kept the clump in shape for years. In the end we dug it out, a mammoth task, but the slates had worked.
It depends on where it's growing as to whether or not it's practical to trace or not. On mine the runners had grown under the lawn, so it was a case of tracing the runner from the parent plant and following each 'detour'. It is time consuming and the lawn takes a bit of a beating, but so far I've only seen evidence of 2 small sections of runner I'd missed. That's 2 years on from removing them.
We lined ours with a very heavy duty plastic liner. It was expensive and hard to put in but worth the effort. I would say it would be difficult to do now but if you can trace it back to the original bamboo but sounds hard work.