You need to dig up the rhizomes.

Thanks. But then what's all this about propagating from the culms?

Propagating from culms works mainly with some tropical, clumping species, but not with the running bamboos and not with anything you're likely to be able to grow outdoors in your Zone. More specifically, if you want to propagate your golden bamboo, your only option is to dig up a decent size rootball -- about basketball size or so -- with several healthy culms. Do this before April while the bamboo is somewhat dormant so you shock it less.

Thanks for the info. I probably wont bother with it then. I wanted it for a long strip as a privacy barrier between us and a neighbor, but it doesn't sound like I will be able to get enough from digging up a valuable rootball, and possibly damaging what we already have, to be worth it.

You certainly won't damage your existing plant by taking a division. And although you may not have an instant privacy screen from one division, you could take several divisions and plant them in a row. If you took three 1' x 1' divisions (with a couple of culms in each) from both ends of your 3' x 20' planting, it would make very little difference to the look of your established planting, and you'd have 6 new plants to create the long strip. In a couple of years (at most) you'll have a decent screen there.

I would suggest you wait for your new shoots in 2011 they may be alot farther than you think. But you must wait for them to completely leaf out before you dig them. Plus if you wait you will have many more canes to choose from. Your number of canes will probably double maybe even triple this year. Trust me be patient. Your grove will be huge this year and then it won't matter if you take a few more divisions. This is just my opinion but, I feel if you dig them before they shoot you will only set the whole grove back. And you will not get near as many canes as if you wait. I have 29 different species and have been growing and digging out groves for 10 years. Good Luck and hope to hear back about how it went.

Thanks much alan and boomantoo and others who have offered comments. Sorry I'm so long in replying. The length of the area I have to transplant these rootballs is quite long, probably 400'. So I don't know how far they are going to go. I originally bought 5 bamboos in 1 gal pots. It took probably 5 years for them to reach full size. That's a reason I was hesitant to dig into them.

So are you saying that I just dig down and dig up a rootball with a rhizome attached to each then cut it into pieces and plant these? I assume I need to find a thick section of culms to dig from. If I do it I will wait until spring as you suggest.

What you want is for each decent size rootball to become another plant; you do not sub-divide it. If you do that then you will end up with pieces that could be too small to survive. You want to dig up each rootball and re-plant it without messing around with it any more than necessary.

Thanks kudzu9.

If each basketball shaped rootball only makes one plant than it seems like all I'd be doing is digging up and moving a bamboo plant from one area to another. Like transplanting any other plant. A loss at the first area a gain at the second - one for one. Which is not much of a gain. I was thinking that from one plant I could get many others.

It would probably also take a really long time to fill the area I was wanting to fill at that rate. Might just be better to either buy a bunch of 1 gal bamboos IF I can find them and at an affordable price or just plant some other kind of screen.

Each rootball will eventually put up new shoots. The more rootballs you plant, the sooner the area will fill in and get thick with new growth.

Only one rootball may take a few years to get a dozen or so shoots depending on amount of roots/rhizomes in the rootball and other factors such as moisture, sunlight, soil type and fertilizer.

Kt

Thanks kentuck_8b. I get that but seems like in the meantime I'd be denuding my first area to get rootballs for the second. I'll have to think if I want to do that.

If you take the divisions from the ends of your existing planting area you won't even notice they're gone -- unless you don't have that many culms to begin with. I don't grow golden so don't know how many culms it produces, so maybe that's the case. I'm just picturing my own young groves which have dozens and dozens of culms.

If you're concerned, then take a single division from that existing plant this year and plant it. Then next year take another one or two, depending on how your existing plant fares (you'll see that it does just fine). Doing this you'll also have the benefit of seeing how far that first division spread in its first year.

After about 3-4 years, bamboo is typically mature and is spreading out, and at 7 years you should have quite a few more culms than you started with. You also have quite a few underground rhizomes. You want to take rootballs of the size I described, with one or more culms attached, to get this grove to spread faster. Be selective, but where you remove rootballs/culms will fill back in. Those potted bamboos that you bought originally were produced in just this way. If you want to take somewhat smaller rootballs than I described, that's ok, but it will just take longer for the plant to re-grow (as you saw when starting with 1-gallon sizes). The link below shows a picture of what I'm talking about...a decent size division. However, it's not as easy to do as it looks because she is using a specialized tool in very soft ground. If you decide to dig, you may want to post for specific directions in order to get a rootball out without messing it up, because it takes some skill to get through the rhizomes.

Here is a link that might be useful: Division

Thanks alan and kudzu. That link is interesting because she's only taking one culm and the chunk of ground beneath it. Can I assume then that there is a rootball connected to each and every culm? If so then that would seem like it would work for what I'm wanting to do. I do have a lot of culms relatively speaking. I was thinking that the actual rootballs were few and far between and that the culms are just growing from stolons spreading out from the rootballs bermuda grass style. I didn't want to dig down and around fishing for a few rootballs and be destroying culms in the process.

Course most of the culms in my stand seem to be grouped together thickly so that I'd probably have to take a big chunk to get them all out intact. If I do can they be separated into each their own section of rootball so that I can plant them in a long row in the new area?

Wait a minute, I just reread Kudzu's post @ Jan 9, 11 at 4:28. So then it looks like if I have to take a big chunk of bamboo (because the culms are growing together too closely to separate) I have to replant it as a chunk. That's a bummer, cause then it wont go as far.

zephyray-
Let's get our terminology straight here. Your rhizomes (roots) have spread out underground and are often tangled together. When you take a division, you don't go looking for a "rootball" as if it were some discrete, specialized, hidden root structure. A rootball is simply a big chunk of dirt, complete with whatever roots exist in that chunk of dirt. If you chop down around any culm, and take a big enough piece of dirt, you will have a rootball. The reason you want to take a rootball in a location with a culm is that is a mature area of the root system and you will see reproductive growth much sooner with your transplant. You want to do this by spring so you have an older culm....not something that just came up a few months ago. This will not hurt the roots that are running to or from other culms.

When you take the rootball, you chop or cut down through the culms by using a root pruning saw, a Sawzall, and/or a lopper, and then you pry the rootball out of the ground with a pick axe or demolition bar (if you just use an ordinary shovel, you may break it).

Take a look at this video of a guy taking a division of a bamboo (the title says it's a clumping bamboo, but it's actually a runner, just like yours). While he does take a smaller division than I'd like to see, and he tops the culm (which isn't usually necessary if you get a bigger rootball), you can see that it's pretty straight forward. I will also note that getting the first division out in a particular area is harder than subsequent ones: his removal is a little easier than yours might be because he already has a hole to one side of the division.

I think you're making this harder than it needs to be, but if this still looks too difficult, then your best approach may be to simply buy some more potted divisions.

Here is a link that might be useful: Bamboo division

kudzu - "Let's get our terminology straight here".

Thanks for the description. I was imagining a "rootball" to be a thick, "basketball sized" mass of roots, but it sounds like the basketball size applies to the chunk of ground you take up which has the roots within whatever size that might be.

"I think you're making this harder than it needs to be"

You're right. That seems to be, unfortunately, the usual way I take to learning new things. In my mind I tend to inflate the difficulty of learning something new much more than it usually turns out to have been in retrospect.

Thanks much for the video. Will take a look. And thank you and others for your patience. You're a great group.

zephyray-
You're right. The rootball is a chunk of dirt with whatever roots happen to be in it when you pull it from the ground. The main thing is that you want to try to get the rootball (dirt and roots) out in one piece since the plant will do best if it's re-planted with the roots still surrounded by the dirt.

Thanks kudzu. Much appreciated.