Some of my bamboos Well leafed out now

Most of my bamboos are at least 50% leafed out by now which is good since it means they can produce energy for next year's shoots.

 Phyllostachys Parvifolia

Deers destroying plants and recovery; Peppers and winter melons

Hot peppers and winter melon plants were the most damaged, but I tried to spray them with deer repellant and will be putting up deer netting once it gets in the mail.

Here's some bhut jolokia and trinidad scorpion, almost completely stripped of foliage, which will take at least 2-3 weeks to recover and keep growing.

Progress on my hot peppers 6 varieties April through July 9 time lapse

This year I decided to try growing multiple varieties of hot peppers including bhut jolokia (ghost pepper), trinidad scorpion, devil's tongue, cayenne, banana, and pequin. All of them do look slightly different however the super-hot peppers that are rated among the hottest in the world tend to have very large leaves, and take a longer time to flower. I did start the seeds in the beginning of April so that should be still more than enough time to get a good harvest since they can keep growing until some time in October. I'll start from the beginning.

April 2, here are some of the seeds germinating after a week or so.

Results of some of my bamboo divisions taken this year

It sometimes takes a bit of experience to get good divisions consistently, and success rates will vary depending on the species and other factors as well such as temperatures. Here's just some of my results.

Phyllostachys parvifolia: I took 14 divisions 6-8ft tall and potted them into 5 gallon containers. Since I took large root balls with lots of rhizome and roots on both ends, it looks like all of them made it, and I have most of them already adapted to full sun only after 4 days of division.

cleaning up a bamboo grove, culling, taking divisions; phyllostachys parvifolia timber running bamboo

This year my phyllostachys parvifolia has gone from 4-5ft shoots of last year up to 7-12 footers, and it spread out pretty good producing around 45 new shoots. It looked a bit messy with the new shoots leafing out and the old culms at the bottom, blocking the view of the culms. I ended up culling all the old culms and a few of the tiny culms from this year, and also took around 15 divisions.

Here's the grove before the clean up.