Yup, we too bought a place with invasive bamboo. I researched for months and watched dozens of youtube videos. The following method seems to be the most often cited by people who seem to know what they're doing. There are no quick fixes and gimmicks are a waste of effort, some of which are crazy and toxic.

Cut bamboo close to the ground and within 15 seconds generously paint the cut with undiluted roundup concentrate. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When new growth emerges wait until some leaves emerge and cut and paint.

We had so much bamboo that this wasn't feasible. My husband cut it all down in the summer and we treated the new growth as leaves emerged. In the late fall we had someone with a bobcat with digger attachment dig it all out and haul it away. We're expecting some stray growth but now it should be manageable. The "earth" under the grove was like a solid foot of cork that was impossible to chop, saw, or dig through. You will fight this for years if you don't have it physically removed.

As you may know, roundup requires significant bodily protection (respirator, eye protection, and proper gloves, careful clean up) and spraying it on bamboo will just be toxic with little effect on the bamboo. My recollection is that glyphosate, the active ingredient in roundup, will be pulled from the market next year.

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The only successful way of removing bamboo permanently is through physical means. Using herbicide just will not cut it (although it can help some).

RoundUp is by no means the only product to use glyphosate. Bayer has announced plans to reformulate residential use RoundUp to make it less glypho-dependent but there are NO plans on having this herbicide (glyphosate) removed from the marketplace. That is a decision that is left to the individual state and even often to a specific county or municipality. Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world, with nearly 2 million pounds of it used annually. Until there is something equally as effective to replace it, I seriously doubt it will be disappearing any time soon.

btw, for woody based plants - like the bamboo - triclopyr is a much more efficient herbicide than is glyphosate.

You can get rid of the bamboo by cutting it all down to the ground and religiously and immediately removing every single sprout that pops back up before it has a chance to leaf out. The object is to starve the root system. Yes, it will take 3 to 4 years, but there will not be any bamboo to look at while it is happening. The good news is bamboo does its main growth in one quick spurt in the spring. You can even find a recipe for bamboo shoots and eat them. No poison in that case.

You used to be able to get people to come get your bamboo for free if it's a desirable species. "Free bamboo U dig!" would show up on Craigslist. Don't know if people still do that though. :)

I have bamboo in my yard and it shoots ALL YEAR. So species and climate might influence your attack strategy.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s situation or make recommendations on what will work or won’t but i will share my experience so far. We have running bamboo invading our yard from a neighbor’s. I have had it cut down several times (which helps temporarily and slows the spread), tried to use roundup both on the leaves and the cut/paint method (absolute waste of time and money for our situation), and have tried to dig it up with a backhoe and install metal barrier (some luck temporarily). The issue is, we missed some roots digging it up which is quite easy to do, and we never are able to get all of it since it’s our neighbor’s so it just runs right back into yard. Last fall I decided to try the exhaustion method in an effort to reach it all, even areas I can’t personally access ;) We had it mowed down with an industrial tractor in the late fall and now that all the new growth is happening, I am going out each weekend and cutting down all of the new shoots and stalks that emerge using pruners. I spend about two hours at a time but am hopeful this will eventually work for our situation since it supposedly exhausts the entire system (and given the slowed return we saw in the past mowing it down). I have read differing accounts of how many seasons it will take to fully die off. Either way, I will keep with it as we already have stay on top of cutting back and eradicating as much as possible or it will literally quickly and easily spread everywhere. Hoping this does the trick once and for all. Good luck to you. And to anyone out there thinking of planting this stuff—-please don’t! It’s pretty but its not fair to your neighbors or future owners.

Help! i cut down about 10 mature stalks, dragged them out to open yard and cut down to 3 foot lengths then put in yard waste bags for garbage pick up did i do more damage by spreading seeds into areas of my yard? would a preemergent nuke kill bermuda seeds?

the running bamboo seeds. god willing, ill still be around for decades but dont want to deal with then , what i am now. thanks for the feedback

Oh, just noticed, in my panic i typed bermuda seeds. no i only worried about the bamboo spreading from cuttings via seeds

If the bamboo was alive when you cut it, it will have no seeds. As stated, bamboo flowers and sets seed very, very infrequently. It can spread from active or living rhizomes but never from seed unless in a rare flowering sequence.

In the process or removing, maybe starting with outer ones could make a nice shape, shown at left.

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For those who are thinking about using chemical methods to control bamboo, the only thing you will accomplish will be to unnecessarily contaminate your yard. As someone who has grown many varieties of bamboo over the last 20 years, I can tell you that physical methods are what will work. Cut it down, dig it out, break off new shoots as they emerge, put in HDPE bamboo barrier if you want to grow it in a controlled way, etc. If there was a magic chemical solution to out-of-control bamboo, it would be on the market and clearly advertised as such.

I don’t know if there is more than one type of running bamboo or not, but for many years I have most that are up to 50’ high and the rhyzomes don’t grow but about 6”

underground I’ve dug trenches around them to contain them in an island The trenches 9” deep have stopped the rhyzomes from crossing over