Trimming some bamboos

In many parts of the world, bamboo is evergreen, and looks pretty and fresh even after winter. Some of my more cold-hardy bamboos look pretty good right now, even after the harsh winter we had in St. Louis. Leaves that were completely killed by the cold and wind will soon fall from the plant, but those plants with larger leaves that are still partially green pose more of a problem.

What to do with these leaves that are not dead, but still look quite ugly? If there are few enough of the damaged leaves, you can prune them off individually. When you have a lot of tattered leaves though, it's time to get more proactive.

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Here are a couple more plants that look pretty bad right now:

Sasa tsuboiana

Sasaella masmuneana 'Albostriata'

These all look pretty similar right now, but the last one looks quite different when the leaves are new and fresh -- their creamy variegation is really beautiful. Right now, not so beautiful.

There's no reason I couldn't leave these plants completely alone. The new leaves will be emerging soon, and the new shoots will also produce new leaves. There will be so much fresh foliage that these ratty leaves won't be visible most of the time. Probably. But they'll still be visible sometimes, for instance when the wind blows the nice leaves out of the way.

So they really do need to come off -- if I don't do it then I'll be regretting it later this year. So I'm going to take the pruning shears to these, as if they were a hedge I wanted to clean up. I won't mow them completely down to the ground though, because there are branches forming which will help fill the plant in faster:

So here's the Sasaella bitchuensis getting some attention with the shears:

The branch shoots are still intact -- at least some of them.

Here are the other two plants:

I actually trimmed this front one down a little more after taking the photo, and raked more of the cut leaves out of the way.

The plant in the background has much less damage, and I haven't decided exactly what to do with it yet:

Indocalamus longiauritus

I may just trim off the worst leaves now, and do some touch-up pruning if needed later this year. The advantage to not removing the leaves completely is that they can provide more energy to the plant as it's producing new shoots.

I probably took more leaves off those first three plants than I needed to, but I've had some problems with mites:

Those small white patches are webs. I don't know what sort of mites
I have on these plants, as the damage is not nearly as severe as you see in
photos of bamboo mite damage. Whatever type they are I want them gone.

Removing as many leaves as possible from the infected plants will help me get the mite problem under control. I'm not going to put all of these leaves into my compost pile either, because I don't want to spread the mites:

So I'll put these into the yard waste pickup. Unfortunately I don't have any of those brown paper yard waste bags -- I've never used one before, ever! -- so I'll keep them in this garbage can until I can get some bags.

As painful as this sort of cleanup is -- it's difficult to remove the mostly-green leaves -- it's really essential to having better looking plants throughout the summer. I'm getting better, as I barely hesitated before chopping into these this year.

Hurry up with the new leaves, as looking at a bed full of sticks isn't something I want to be doing for too long!

I've got several more bamboos with this sort of leaf damage that I need to take care of now too, and the new shoots will be starting any day now... this is really bamboo season in my garden!

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