permaculture

[Elfpermacl@aol.com]

Yes, I bought their catalog.  It is a nice visual identification guide to
match some of the more specific but less well illustrated bamboo books in our
library.  In the USA, you can buy copies from The Temperate Bamboo Quarterly,
put out by permaculturists Adam and Sue Turtle.  They are at 30 Meyers Rd.,
Summertown TN 38483 USA.  TBQ is itself the best single source of information
on temperate bamboo.

I got some P. congesta and it drowned in our record flooding.  It is wet
tolerant but did not hold up well to prolonged flooding, even in winter when
many other plants allegetly less tolerant, eg Brown Turkey fig, held on
longer.  I think it would do better in infrequent innundations.  In Ireland,
where it rains in places more than an inch per day, average, you would need
congesta on hillsides.  You might also get away with P. rubro-marginata (or
something like that), which thrives with abundant moisture, but is less
waterlogging than congesta.
        If your winters are mild enough to get by with some of the Bambusas, 
you may
find better flooding resistance.  We had a B. oldhamii under water for more
than six months (including all of winter, which makes it less of a problem
unless anerobic diseases are a factor).  It had been set out from a pot mid-
summer, during a drought of equally epic proportions to the flood to follow.
Bamboos don't do much their first few years and are rather fragile for a few
years after setting out, generally. but the oldhamii wenthrough about 9 months
of flooding (it was lower than some of the other plants), sent up new side
shoots in the spring and now has a new main shoot about 6 or 8 times in
diameter of the original shoots.  Meanwhile the water has ebbed back and
forth, not flooding the crown again since the rest of the state had drought
this spring (which served to remove about 20 percent of our flood waters,
surface wise) and now the water is back well above the root zone.  You can all
but watch the shoot grow.  However, the Bambusas are more of a sub-tropical to
tropical genus.  I don't know if they require summer heat as well as lack of
serious winter cold.  Oldhamii certainly did not start shooting here until
about the end of July or early August.  If it can grow in Ireland, it would be
a nice one to have as the clums reach about 4" in diameter and it is very tall
and beautiful.  B. multiplex is tougher but I haven't seen how it handles wet
since ours are high and dry, serving as a shelter for our house and banana's
from the westerly winds that come unimpeded across the water and swamp lands.
I got a variety of multiplex from the bamboo statation in Savannah Georgia,
which has much colder winters than we do.  

For Mother Earth, Dan Hemenway, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since 1982),
Elfin Permaculture workshops, lectures, Permaculture Design Courses,
consulting and permaculture designs (since 1981), and annual correspondence
courses via email.  Copyright, 1998, Dan & Cynthia Hemenway, P.O. Box 52,
Sparr FL 32192 USA  Internships. YankeePerm@aol.com  

We don't have time to rush.

A list by topic of all Yankee Permaculture titles may be found at
http://csf.colorado.edu/perma/ypc_catalog.html
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