Building And Planting Up Two Bamboo Beds With Rhizome Barrier

Hello and welcome to Gardening at 58 North. So in this video I'm going to be putting in two bamboo liners for some bamboo that I'm going to be planting at the back of my garden. But first of all I'd like to just tell you about the site and what I've done here previously and why I'm going to be turning it into a bamboo kind of area at the back of my garden. So previously I actually had this as a vegetable plot. I had a no-dig no-maintenance vegetable plot. I have done a video about it recently and I'll put a link in for that now if you want to see how I did that. But basically what I did is I just mulched everything, good cardboard and then I put mulch on top of the cardboard and then planted underneath the cardboard potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes. I then left them growing for a whole year, didn't do any weeding because it was well mulched and I got a good harvest just now. So what I've all I've done is I've not actually done any digging. I've got the spade and the fork out but I've only used the rake. I raked off all the mulch which is this here. This used to be cardboard and wood chips but now it's just a lovely pile of compost. You can see here it's really nice compost now. It was just wood chips but it's completely or just about completely rotted down so I'll be using that for my bamboo as a soil improver. This is all the harvest I've managed to get. Two large buckets and basically one large bucket and a trug. So this is the ground that that's been taken from. When I do a bit more digging I'll probably find a few more but I just need to be aware they might start popping up once I've done the bamboo barrier. So the site here is actually really bad soil. There used to be a shed here years ago and so there's a lot of rubble and rubbish and compacted soil so digging out the bamboo barrier might be a little bit tricky. But the idea is I'm going to put this bamboo on the right here going from around about here right along to the back. So I'll need bamboo barrier to contain that. This is a phyllostachys edgeless. This is also known as mosso bamboo. Now I've grown this from seed and this is the first winter it's been outside which is why it's not looking too happy at the moment. It's got a lot of leaf burn from the cold winds but it did survive down to minus six in the pot this year without any damage at all so it looks like it should do well in my climate hopefully. But it doesn't do as well with the summers so the winter hardiness this should be fine but summer heat is quite low here in Scotland. We don't have long hot summers so this might struggle a little bit to really get going and grow quickly. So I need to improve the soil as much as possible because I've got really rich soil so this does grow well. But you can see there's quite a few shoots coming up already even though it's just the first of March today and there's a lot more further down you can see some tiny ones there and there. So this will shoot up nicely and I think this will actually grow fairly well in my climate even though it's not the ideal climate. I think with enough compost and feed it should do okay. So this will be going in this side. Now this is the phyllostachys edgeless, one of the biggest hardy bamboos you can pretty much get. So this won't actually form much of a cover but it'll be really tall. So I'll put it on this side because I don't really need to block anything on either side. But if you look up there is a power line at the back and I can't have this at the back otherwise I'll be hitting the power line constantly as it's a giant timber bamboo. So that's why that was going on the side. Now the other bamboo that I'm putting at the back is a bit shorter. Now in theory it could reach the top of the power lines but in my climate it's not too likely. I'd say they're probably about eight meters in height so it should be fine. If it does ever get that big I will prune this. But this bamboo, although it's almost a timber bamboo, it is a phyllostachys. It's a phyllostachys orosocata and the variety is spectabilis. So this bamboo, it doesn't grow as big as the phyllostachys edgeless and it has smaller canes so it should have more of a screening effect. The mozo bamboo here on the right, this has a lot of bare stems at the base so it's not great for screening unless you're screening objects higher up. Near the ground level they probably won't have any leaves when it's mature. Whereas this phyllostachys orosocata does have some more leaves lower down. So this will make a good screen at the back here and it's quite a nice bamboo. The variety, as I say, is spectabilis and that means it has this kind of yellow with a green stripe coming up the side of the cane. Now it's not sowing it too well at the moment because these bamboo canes aren't particularly large but it should be bright yellow with a nice green stripe. I've sown it a bit on some of them but it will become more pronounced as it matures. Another nice thing about this bamboo is the canes that go bright red when they're young so you can see there. If it's in sunshine it goes bright red and then it goes more yellow and then it also has strips of variegation on the leaves. You can see that one there. Every now and again you get a bit of variegation on some of the leaves so it's quite a nice bamboo that should do well in that corner. So both these bamboos are from the phyllostachys genus so they are running bamboos. They can become invasive over time so I need to be really careful with them, make sure I've got bamboo barrier. So what I'm doing is I'm going to be installing this bamboo barrier here. Now I think this is about 600 millimetres or 60 centimetres in depth. That's just about deep enough. Now what you want to do is get the biggest and thickest type of bamboo barrier that you can afford especially if you've got some of the more aggressive phyllostachys bamboos because once they start running it's hard to stop them from running. They can easily go underneath patios and paving areas so you really want to keep them contained if you can. One of the best ways to do that is to get some high density polyethylene which is what this is. I've gone for the thicker variety. This is two millimetres thick. You can also get one millimetre thick or thinner but two millimetre thick is a really good thickness and that that should hold most bamboos. Now there are other bamboo barriers which are more fabric type. This is a solid bit of plastic. The fabric ones I feel like they're probably fine for small bamboos but with these giant timber bamboos if you want to be safe you should really try and get the hard plastic type instead of the fabric because I think with the fabric eventually the runners will just push through. They are pointy the runners and they can probably push through a fabric barrier eventually. So if you want to be safe go for the biggest and thickest you can afford and try and go for this kind of high density polyethylene with a really thick layer. So as I say two millimetres is a good thickness and try and go for as deep as possible. Obviously the deeper you go the less likely the runners are going to escape but it's a lot more work with digging. So with the runners they shouldn't really go much more than a foot deep. So this is you can as you can see it's twice as deep as what I'd imagine the runners would ever go. So this should be absolutely fine and I'll show you some of the runners on my phyllostachys orosocata because this one actually sows it quite nicely. A few of these actually come out they came out the pot last autumn and started to sprout. So you can see here this is what the runner looks like. It's basically just like a stem that runs just underneath the surface of the ground and it has that kind of sharp point on the end of it and that's what can push through concrete and lots of other materials. You can get away with concrete sometimes if it's quite thick concrete but if there's any cracks in it there is a chance this could push through. So ideally you would go for some kind of high density plastic that can handle that. So I'll show you here now on the side so you can have an idea of what the the runners look like. You can see they do come down. This one probably because it was in a pot it did actually come right down about 20 centimeters in depth. You can see it runs around there and then it comes up. Normally the runners run horizontally and then you'll get the combs or the canes coming up directly from them. Sometimes you might get one that comes to the end and then sticks up like this one and that can also become a cane but often the canes are actually formed from further down on the horizontal runners. So these are the things that are the biggest problem. Now the roots themselves in the bamboo the roots can go much deeper they could go up to two meters deep but the roots don't actually make any more shoots and the roots don't normally cause any damage whatsoever. It's the runners that cause the damage and it's the new shoots pushing up through houses or through concrete that causes the damage. So as long as you can keep the runners contained you don't have to worry too much about the roots. So these roots will come out the bottom of my bamboo barrier and they'll spread quite far but they won't cause any damage because they'll be really deep underground. It's the canes and the runners that cause the problem and they'll stay right up in the surface. So what I'm going to do now is start marking out where I'm going to dig out the the ground for putting in the bamboo barrier here. It will be quite a difficult job there's gonna be a lot of digging. What I'm going to do is I'm going to separate the topsoil from the subsoil. So the topsoil is where your most nutrients are in the soil and it's the first layer of the soil. You want to keep that on the top. The subsoil you should notice when you dig further down that you'll find some poorer looking soil that's to be kept at the bottom. And what I'm going to do is there's a lot of stones in my garden and I'm just going to keep them to the side. Once I've dug out the trench where these bamboos are going to be growing I'm then going to line it with subsoil and rocks. All that will do is it encourages the rhizomes to stay near the surface and not go too deep. Now they should be absolutely fine with this kind of barrier. There is a slight risk normally they would be in the first 20-30 centimeters of soil but when it hits the barrier the rhizome can sometimes go down and go a bit deeper. So you want to make sure there's something hard underneath if you can just to try and prevent that. And the other thing you'll do which I'll show later once I've put the rhizome barrier in the ground is you want to angle it. So if it was angled say this way the bamboo shoot would come in it's more likely to go down. You don't want that because that will cause it to go deeper and it might go under the barrier. So you want to angle your barrier like this so when it hits it it's more likely to go up instead of down and that will give you much more protection. And you also want to have your barrier about 5-10 centimeters above the ground just to stop any canes that try and come up and over the barrier which is a problem that can occur. It shouldn't be a big problem for me because I can always see that happening and cut it off. So what I'm going to do now is start digging this out. I'll come back to you once I've made some good progress. I'm going to start with this this side here. The back side is a lot more rubbish and there's also a lot of clay so it can be quite wet soil. We had a lot of rain recently so I'll just work with the sandier soil here. I need to lift up a slab there because I'm going to have the bed just right up to the so instead of having this section of paving two slabs wide I'm going to narrow it to one slab wide. I'll have a nice strip along here and when you are making your bamboo barrier bed you want to make sure it's as big as possible. The bigger it is the bigger your bamboo will become. If you give it a really small space you'll never get a giant size bamboo. So if you're growing a small bamboo or one that doesn't get too big it doesn't matter if you don't give it a huge amount of space but if you want to get those really big giant canes you really need to let your bamboo have as much space as possible. So that's why I've gone for 10 meter rolls. I've got two of these so each bamboo will have 10 meters of bamboo barrier containing it so they'll have a decent amount of space to grow and what I'll be doing is I'll be having two separate beds because I don't want these to intermix and and start spreading around so I don't want this congested one coming around here and weakening the the giant timber bamboo. I don't want the giant timber bamboo coming around to this other bed and then causing problems with getting close to the power cables up above so that's why I'm keeping them in two separate beds and the other reason is I don't know which out of the two of these is the most vigorous. There's a chance that if one's much stronger than the other it could out-compete the other bamboo and then one bamboo would take over and I'd only have one variety instead of two varieties of bamboo. So in order to start digging out the trench for the root barrier here what I need to do is make sure I know exactly how long the the rhizome barrier is. So what I'm going to do is I know this is 10 meters long or at least that's what I've ordered. It needs to be about a nine meter trench in the complete circumference of it so that this can have some overlap. It's very important that I have a really good overlap with this so that the roots can't come in between the gap where the the two sections meet and push through. So what I'll be doing is I'll just be getting a piece of rope basically measuring it to about nine meters, draping it along this bed and that'll be my guide when I'm digging. So it's the next day and I'd like to show you the progress I made in day one. Now unfortunately there's a lot of material under here which is making it really hard to dig. There used to be an old shed here and I think before they put the shed there they just used it as a dumping ground for rubbish and they just put all the stones and rubbish that they had in the garden underneath the shed and used it as a bit of a foundation. So there's lots of like old bits of felt from the from the shed roof here. There's also a lot of plastic as well, quite a few stones you can see there's some larger ones there and unfortunately there is a massive stone over here as well. So what I've been doing is I've skimmed off the topsoil that's all in this bag now. I would expect the topsoil to be deeper normally in my garden it's about 15 to 20 centimetres deep. Here unfortunately it seems to be five centimetres of topsoil and then it's just basically loads of stones about 20 centimetres deep of rubble which they've probably used as a solid foundation and then underneath that layer of stone it is just kind of like a silty almost like a loam and normally the rest of my garden's sandy and full of stones but underneath that the first layer of stones that they've used as a foundation is actually decent soil. So with the spade you can see here it's just all completely solid it's all stones the whole lot there is a trench along the side where there wasn't any foundations for the shed that's fine and the most surprising thing was these I thought were normal slabs but they're not they're actually cast in situ on top of this plastic I had to peel the plastic off the bottom of the the concrete because it was cast onto that and because it's cast concrete it's actually a lot thicker than a normal slab and it's uneven so you can see there it's actually really thick it's almost in some places you can see with this one over here this one was smaller so it was easier to move but in some places it was actually almost twice as thick as a normal slab so definitely quite difficult to move this one I'm going to have to move at some point but it's probably about twice as heavy as a normal three-way two and underneath that there's actually this layer here which is actually a layer of like asphalt or tarmac I don't know why that's under here and underneath the layer of tarmac it's that compacted layer of stones so on the edge it is quite thin only a couple of centimeters but I'm going to have to get my pickaxe and smash through all this all this tarmac and find something to dispose of that before I can continue digging I did do an exploratory hole to see what was underneath and as I say the layer of stones and then it's just normal soil underneath so what I'm going to do is dig out the layer of stones set it aside as topsoil because it's near the surface it probably is similar to topsoil I'm going to separate all the stones because if there's loads of stones the bamboo is going to struggle to grow through it and then I'm going to put the topsoil back on mix it in with this compost and also some feed which I'll talk about later on in the video and then I'll refill and the only thing of interest found so far is one coin hasn't got any value unfortunately but it is a bit weird that is here it seems to be a Danish coin um 1970 no idea why there's a Danish coin in Scotland but presumably the last owner had gone to Denmark on holiday at some point and uh yeah so that's the only thing of interest so far I'll let you know if there's anything else interesting that comes up in this dig that's going to be a huge more work than I was expecting especially as I'm going to have even the rest of it which isn't tarmac I can't dig it with my spade it needs the pickaxe I did use the matic on this section just to dig out that so I'll definitely need a pickaxe or my matic to smash through all these stones because a normal spade won't cut it so I thought I could dig this out in one day I think it's going to take me several days to dig out all the stones and separate them from the soil and I'll get back to you in a few days time and we'll see how much progress I've made so it's now the next day I did manage to make a reasonable amount of progress yesterday now the amount of stones I was quite underestimated how much stones there would be a huge amount you can see this is all the rubbish that came out of it so quite a lot of plastic a tiny bit of asbestos I need to dispose that properly and also a lot of asphalt as well or tarmac and a few bits of metal and also an old measuring tape that was plastic so it didn't corrode I found all these stones as well particularly large one there some bits of concrete and that other pile of stones and that is a huge amount of stones considering that's the only section I've done and I've only done the first foot I haven't dug any deeper massive amount of stones wasn't expecting that so it did take a lot longer than I had expected but it should be a lot easier going forward now so I've dug a hole just to really see what the soil is like underneath and around this side I can actually show you what the whole area was like you can see the top layer it's just like a course of stones so I think they've just laid this as a foundation for the shed and on top of that at that end was also the tarmac so about 20 centimeters or a foot or so maybe 30 centimeters of stones that I had to dig through so I really had to use a matic and a pickaxe to get through that and then looking down here I think looking at the site of my house there's like a hill above my house and a hill below it so it kind of slopes down and it's flat actually where my property is so I think this has actually been leveled and raised slightly so in the front garden for example I've only got about 20 centimeters of topsoil and then it tends to go down to the more like the subsoil down this section there doesn't really seem to be much differentiation between topsoil and subsoil and to be honest I've got about three foot or two or three foot anyway of this kind of nice loamy soil it's again it's quite different to my front garden there's quite a bit of clay in here you can see it's kind of holding together in lumps it's not a clay soil but it's certainly not sandy it's not as sandy as the front garden front garden is extremely sandy here it's quite a bit of clay and and stuff mixed in so it's actually going to be quite good soil once I enrich it but at the moment it's pretty terrible soil it's basically no organic matter and there's no worms or any kind of life in here at the moment so definitely need to improve the soil but there's a good depth to it anyway and at the bottom you can just maybe about see a bit of sandy material it's kind of hard to to dig down there at the moment it's so deep but basically what I've hit there is the subsoil and in my area what it is is it's glacial deposits and coastal deposits I'm kind of in between the the coast and the glacial deposits from from the Cairngorms so I get a lot of granite basically all these stones are glacially deposited granite and down there it's just pure sand almost like sand from a sand pit with loads and loads of stones so that's completely solid I'm really happy that that's about the depth of the root barrier because it means that the rhizomes really won't be able to escape underneath it's really solid I mean the barriers deep enough anyway that they shouldn't escape underneath but they are one in a million chance that they do I have got a really solid base there of compacted stones and sand that they're not going to get through and the roots will stay quite near the surface as well so it might be a bit susceptible in drought because I've only got about two or three foot where the roots are probably going to grow I doubt many roots are going to grow into that compacted layer so I need to make sure I keep this well watered but otherwise it should make for a really good bed so as I say the soil is pretty bad quality at the moment not any life in it no organic matter so I'm going to do is dig in a lot of this composted material this is reed so that's great I'm just going to dig that into the soil I'm also going to dig in a lot of slow-release fertilizer so bloodfish and bone to give it the nutrition that it needs because the compost itself doesn't have a huge amount of nutrition apart from maybe phosphorus and a bit of potassium that has basically no nitrogen and the as being a grass bamboo likes a lot of nitrogen so I need to add bloodfish and bone for that but it will also add a bit more phosphorus and potassium because although this is really nice compost let's say it's low in nutrition it's more just helping with the structure of the soil and feeding the microorganisms than actually feeding the plant so that needs to be dug in that'll make this into a really rich topsoil with a bloodfish and bone and I'm also going to put a little bit of wood ash from my parents garden because the soil here is quite acidic I just want to bring a bit more to the neutral range because that'll be better for the bamboo and also there's a lot of phosphorus and calcium in the wood ash so that'll also help with bamboo's growth so I'm going to do now is dig this whole lot over I'm not going to dig it too deep because I don't want to encourage the rhizomes to go too deep so I'm only going to do about a foot in depth of really good rich soil and I'm going to be or maybe just over a foot you're going to be incorporating that compost and feed and then taking out any excess stones and then what I'll be doing is I'll be digging the trench ready for the bamboo barrier so I'll just stand back here again see how many stones there were and there's going to be quite a few more coming out there once I dig it over I've only gone over that once with the matic there's probably going to be not this once again but definitely a decent amount of stone still to be taken out and then hopefully with this back section this should be a lot easier because this is where I'm going to put the other bamboo barrier it's going to be thinner and it's going to be longer and the the back section here there was actually the layer of stones it only goes up to about 20 centimeters away from the fence at that side but at the back it's more about 40 or 50 centimeters around about this layer here so coming along there shouldn't be too much in the way of stones in this back section and hopefully once we get to about this point because I think the old shed didn't go much further than around about where this grass starts this area over here hopefully won't have any major stones and I have dug in this area in the past and that wasn't too bad for stones so hopefully the the next bamboo barrier will be a lot easier to dig out so that's the trench now most dug out as you can see there's a bit more stones wasn't too bad when it comes to stones but there's a lot of soil to have to dig out what we've done we've separated the top soil and the subsoil so the top soil is in the bulk bag subsoil is separate we don't want to mix the two together because we want to make sure that it's growing in a nice bit soil environment so this is the barrier now we do need to dig it a little bit deeper we've just unrolled it to check how deep it is at the moment it needs to be another five centimeters deep or so towards this end down here it's not too far off and it does need to be slightly higher than the actual edge of the soil to stop any bamboo rhizomes coming up and over the bamboo barrier and there's a good amount of overlap probably more overlap than I'd need but at least we've got plenty of overlap that should really help to stop any rhizomes from escaping and I'll make sure the overlap section is this bit here then this kind of area because if any rhizomes escape I want to escape in my garden where I can control them and not go off underneath the neighbor's garden so that they I can make sure they're well controlled and what we will be doing is I'll be drilling holes through this at the point where it meets and I'll be bolting it together very tightly with stainless steel bolts that will stop any rhizomes from pushing through if you just overlap it there's a risk that the rhizome will creep along the edge and push its way through but we're bolting it together really tightly with with stainless steel bolts won't be able to come through and it's also important I'm using stainless steel that has a high corrosion resistance because that needs to last for decades if not a hundred years so I need to make sure that the bolts don't corrode because if it was just normal steel it would rust eventually and then it would just break and then the bamboo could get out so it's a bit more digging to do as I say not too much more what I also need to make sure that we do is we angle the the bamboo barrier so basically it needs to be angled like that I think I talked about earlier in the video so when the rhizomes come it gets pushed up and not down so that it doesn't go underneath the barrier it's just encouraged to come up and over the barrier where I can see it and then I can cut it so we need to angle this we need to get it bolted together but first of all we need to dig this a good five ten centimeters deeper and there will be a slight raised bit what I might do is I might fill up fill up the insides slightly higher this is two millimeter thick high density polyethylene plastic so it's very strong and I can actually probably use this as a slightly raised bed so I'll probably have it raised about five ten centimeters higher than the external soil that will help in a couple of ways one it will heat up faster in spring two it will be slightly higher than the surrounding soil it means I don't have to dig the barrier quite as deep which will make my life a little bit easier because at the moment we're getting a little bit short of space for this excess soil so that's the plan for now I'll probably see you guys towards the end of the video when we've got this planted up the weird thing is we've done all this groundwork and all this material has been excavated but once it's actually planted up it won't actually look much different to when we actually started it will just have a little bit of plastic sticking out the ground and a small bamboo plant in there so that's the first bamboo barrier put in and fully planted up so as you can see you managed to get rid of quite a few of the stones what I did is once I dug the trough for the bamboo barrier I put the bamboo barrier in and then lined it with lots of stones on the bottom that was a good way to get rid of some of the stones but also it will just discourage the bamboo rhizomes from trying to grow underneath the barrier and escape because a layer of stones will just act as a slight barrier but as I say the barrier should be deep enough that that wouldn't be a problem anyway so we overlapped it by about two meters of overlap probably didn't need as much overlap as that but the amount of bamboo barrier I had was a bit longer than I'd calculated so we had a bit excess so we just overlapped it to save it and the way it can come out if there's any chance at all which I don't think there will be will be only from this section here so as well in my garden I can control any rhizomes that do escape the overlap actually starts over here and it's kind of hard to sew with it the way it's wrapped up but it's bolted together with lots of bolts on the edge here and we put the joint on the corner so it's on the inside so this is plastic is actually pushing incredibly hard against the other plastic and it's almost impossible for the the rhizomes to actually push through there and if it does it then comes up against some stainless steel bolts which are clamping it down really hard any chance it comes through that it has to spy around the whole section here and then it will come out the end there so it's pretty much impossible for the bamboo to escape now especially as that section down there is clamped down so tight so filled up with soil then planted this mojo bamboo right in the middle so spread out in all directions and then I've covered it with a mulch or wood chips just to keep the soil damp and stop it drying out too quick and also the wood chips will stop the weeds from growing which can compete with the bamboo and as it wets down over time it should add to the bed and improve the soil quality so at the moment it does look a bit odd where it's quite high above the ground in some places especially on the left this is actually level but the ground is slightly sloped so that's why this end of the far side looks so much higher what I might do is when I put the other bamboo barrier in I might put some wooden edging at the edge and then just raise it with mulch or something just to make it look a bit more in keeping I do want it about five or ten centimeters above the ground level so it's like a slight raised bed but I don't want it too high so that area I will raise slightly I'll just level the ground a little bit just to make it look a bit more natural and a bit less raised at that side but otherwise that's about it for this bed that's it fully finished I'll just give it a really good watering now and we should have some really good growth over the summer hopefully there is a lot of new shoots that are starting to form with mojo bamboo they do start sprouting really quite early in the season and there is the risk because I'm in a cold part of the world that they might get hit by the frost so what I've done is I've buried it just a little bit deeper than it was in the pot and I've mulched it with wood chips as well so at the moment if there is a hard frost the shoots are actually protected it should be okay but we'll see going forward how it does there is a chance that we could if we get a late frost it could get damaged but I'm hoping that this will spread nicely in this bed and completely fill it within two or three years so the next stage now is to continue and plant up the rest of the bed so I've got my orso cata bamboo here which needs planted so that will be the next job I'll need to dig out this back bed it'll be a lot thinner a lot longer probably go around to about here in length so it'll be quite a long thin bed and I'll just have to pay closer attention to where I'm putting the foundations for my shed because the shed foundations will be right next to the bamboo barrier what I might actually do is move my shed plans slightly further forward just give me a little bit more space at the back and I've got a bit of garden I can afford to lose on the other side so it might actually make sense for me just to move the shed slightly further away from the boundary fence now give me a bit more space for the bamboo also some more space for my trees here which I'll want to harvest apples and and the plums off of that so it might be a good idea to give myself a bit more than a meter of space at the back lose a bit of garden on the side just so it's a bit easier to put bamboo barrier in and give me a bit more growing space so go ahead start with that and the digging wise it shouldn't be as hard as the last one there should be a lot less stones because this area isn't there isn't much the shed foundations underneath here so it should be a lot more straightforward so I won't give as many updates I'll show you it um when it's half completed and then probably at the end when it's fully planted up so I've now dug out the second bamboo bed as you can see there is a huge amount of soil that comes out of the uh the trench when you dig it out so I'll come around here now and show you how the bed was now fortunately there was actually very few stones I've probably only found a total of five or ten stones I think compared with the other bed which probably had over a hundred so it was much easier going a lot easier to dig the only issue I have now is they used to have a pear tree right here now I don't like removing trees but the pear tree was in the wrong place really it's in Scotland it's not a south facing position and so to get pears to germinate and have nice tasting pears is pretty difficult in Scotland anyway and as it was in the south facing wall it really wasn't going to come to much so I got rid of the pear tree but I do have some of the deeper roots that still survived so you can see down here there are some quite substantial roots I'll need to get the matic out on that and dig them out there's also a few other roots from down there now I presume that's also the pear because there's no other large trees in this area really so that's probably some more of the old pear tree so I'll remove those roots move these with the matic as well otherwise the rest of the trench is just about the right depth and area needs to be dug a bit deeper once those roots are gone I'll then refill it with the stones at the bottom so it creates a nice bed to stop the rhizomes coming through I'll then fill it up with the sob soil which is here and then I've got the top soil there which I'll then mix in with some of the compost as well to enhance the soil and I'll just be using the similar kind of feed thing with blood, fish and bone and wood ash so this one is slightly different because it's thinner I didn't leave a bit in the middle because it was too narrow I just basically dug out the entire bed so that's probably why there's a bit more material than there was with the original one even though the bed is a similar size it's because I've not left that central area so a bit more digging out to do and then I'll show you it once it's all planted up and as I say it's that slightly larger bamboo that I'm putting in here the phyllostachys or soccata so a larger plant to begin with but in the end it will actually be smaller than the edgeless over there so that's the two bamboos now planted up as you can see I've actually started the foundations for my shed which I'll put a link in when that video finally comes up so there's a lot of earth moving now but over here we've got the two bamboos planted up this one here was a lot easier there was a lot less stones to worry about the bark looks quite high at the moment but I've only just put the bark on that will sink as you can see with this one that I planted up earlier when I showed you the update earlier in the video the bark was much higher and that's also sunk so I'll probably top that up with more bark at a later stage when I get a bit more bark in but that's this one now planted up the it's looking quite good already in fact a lot of the shoots that came up last autumn they got hit by the frost they lost all their leaves they're actually starting to resprout now lots of new leaves we've had some slightly warmer weather and so this one's actually starting to sprout and looking quite good the phyllostachys edgeless or mosso bamboo that hasn't really done anything yet there's two young shoots with this just starting to come up but they're not really growing much and there's not really much sign of new leaves coming on it but I'm not too worried about that it's March it's far too early for it to grow I'd actually be worried if it was putting up new shoots because they would actually killed by the frost now so I'll probably give you guys an update on these bamboos later in the year hopefully by then the shed's done and all the ground work has been finished so as you can see there's some areas that are quite high this whole ground area needs to be leveled and and standardized because it's all different heights at the moment which is why the the barrier looks so odd because the barrier is mostly the same height all around it's just the ground is very undulating so once I get the shed done I've got all this soil as well that needs to fill back in get the soil levels done this will look quite nice so I'll see you guys probably later in summer when these are shooting up see how much growth they put on this one did really well last year I'm not sure how big it will grow this year because the small ones that should have come up this spring came up in autumn so I feel like it's used up a lot of its energy that it would have used this year but we'll see how it does you never know this might grow some tall canes taller than the ones I had last year if it is happy it should and we'll see how the moso bamboo does I'm quite hopeful for that when it looks at the roots there was decent sized shoots starting to grow so I'm hoping that will at least double in size and we'll see how big it grows as I say the climate isn't ideal for it but we'll just have to see how it does so I'll finish the video here because it's already becoming quite long but I'll give you guys an update later in the year when the plants are fully grown after the initial spring flush and I'll leave you with some photos now of what they look like at the moment with the new shoots just excited to come up in spring