Herbicides alone aren’t enough to deal with a well established cluster of bamboo. The waxy leaves prevent the plant from absorbing them. To properly kill it you need to cut the bamboo close to the ground then pour herbicide on the cut stems as quickly as possible. Waiting even a few minutes can be too long since healthy bamboo will quickly seal cuts. And with healthy bamboo the root systems are so extensive that this will just cause the roots to send up new stalks in other places. So you need to repeat the process of cutting and applying herbicide multiple times until you no longer see new stalks appearing anywhere.
We were lucky enough to have a contractor working here when we first tackled the bamboo patch. He scraped off the first 6” or so of soil with his skid steer. What he dug up was basically a 6 foot square mass of roots…
Herbicides alone aren’t enough to deal with a well established cluster of bamboo. The waxy leaves prevent the plant from absorbing them. To properly kill it you need to cut the bamboo close to the ground then pour herbicide on the cut stems as quickly as possible. Waiting even a few minutes can be too long since healthy bamboo will quickly seal cuts. And with healthy bamboo the root systems are so extensive that this will just cause the roots to send up new stalks in other places. So you need to repeat the process of cutting and applying herbicide multiple times until you no longer see new stalks appearing anywhere.
The stuff is awful, I’ve dug it up before, you really need a machine to drill the roots out doing it by hand is just not efficient enough.
We were lucky enough to have a contractor working here when we first tackled the bamboo patch. He scraped off the first 6” or so of soil with his skid steer. What he dug up was basically a 6 foot square mass of roots…
I just pulled three more stalks half an hour ago…