Bamboo. How to cut bamboo.

Bamboo is so useful. We use them for almost everything in our life. We can eat the young shoot, we can use the wood for building, for making tools and equipment, for almost everything. But how to cut bamboo? How to use bamboo? There are not many people know about that. I want to show the basic idea about how to cut the bamboo. The first thing is select the bamboo older than two years. So the first bamboo, one year old bamboo, will be very fresh and green. But the older one will look dark, dull color like this. This is quite old. This is more than two years old. If it looks like this. And the light green one on the left hand side is the new bamboo that's less than one year old. It looks different. So when we use old bamboo, there's no bugs and then it lasts very long time. And the good season to cut bamboo is the beginning of rainy season or the end of dry season. That is a good time. And when we cut bamboo, the stick like this is dangerous. We need to grab the end of it and cut it because it can bounce back and can hit our eye easily. This is quite dangerous part. So it's good to cut any small stick that can bounce back like this easily. So this is one of the most dangerous thing in cutting bamboo. Many people lost their eye from this thing. So be careful when we cut bamboo. And how to cut bamboo? The first thing is select the one that's old. The oldest one is the strongest one and less bugs will love it. They don't like it because it's hard to eat. So the young one is fresh like this. The color is very fresh and looks nice. And the old one, it looks darker color and not very bright like this. This is old bamboo. How to cut bamboo? We need to look at the bamboo. If it's lean like this, the best way is to cut the bottom part. The bottom like this, the part that lean that side. And then we cut the back side later because if we cut the back first, it will split. It will split in half like that. So it's good to cut the back side that's lean like this first. Just make a small cut on that side. If we can go deep, it will be good. But if we use saw to cut this part, we don't need to cut a lot because it will squeeze the saw. And then just make a small cut a little bit and then cut the back side like this. So it will break, fall down easily like that. This is the sample when it splits. If we do not cut the back side first, it will split like this. We use machetes to cut the branches off. The easiest way is to cut the bottom a little bit like this and use the back side of the machetes to hit it. It will come off easily because it can split like this. If we don't cut the back side good enough, it will split like that. So this part, some kind of bamboo is very tough. It can ruin the edge of our machetes easily if we don't do it like this. This is a simple way to cut and clean the bamboo. With only one machetes, we can do everything. We can build houses. We can make tools and everything with only one machetes. It's very fun. What we need to be aware, be very careful, is when the bamboo splits, the skin of bamboo splits like this. Don't grab and pull because it's very sharp like razor. It always cuts our hand easily if we don't grab it tight enough. And then when we want to split bamboo, we can, there are many techniques to split, but if we don't have many good tools, just machetes, we just hit it and open it like this and then we can push to another bamboo like this. It will split very easily. This is one way we can do it. There are so many ways to split bamboo. After we split it a little bit, and then we can use this technique also. Just push it to the pole, the pillars, or another hard stem like this. That will be easy too. If you want to pull this side and then we don't have fluff, it's good to shave the edge of the green side off. This part is very sharp, so if we work with bare hands, it's very important to clean this part because we can cut our hand easily. Sometimes it cuts very deep. Then we can grab the end and pull it. It will split off easily. This is another technique. How to cut the bamboo into a short piece is very easy. Just chop machetes. You just cut three times. It will cut off. It will be cut off easily. So the bamboo is very easy to cut like this. One time and turn around and cut two times and turn around and cut the third time. It will break and be cut off. It will not break and it will not split if we have a sharp knife. Only three times we can cut it into a small piece easily. And then we can split it to any size as we want to use it. We can make it into a steak, into anything that we want to. So different bamboo we use for different things. It's good to learn different kinds of bamboo first before we use them. The most important thing is to be aware that the edge of the bamboo is always sharp. We need to shape it off before we work with it. If not, we can have a cut easily. To make a steak, it's good to chop the end of it like this. And then we can nail it anywhere easily. We can use it for anything after that. This is another way how to split bamboo. We just open the bottom part of it a little bit and then step on it very tight and then grab it tight and then tear it off like this. Pull it up while our feet step it down and it comes off very easy like this. And then we can split again to make it thinner. This is good in case we want the long strip to make fence, to weaving, to do the long weaving thing. This is very useful way of cutting bamboo. We can split into a small piece as small as we want, but we want to keep it long. So just split half every time. Have to split half. Don't split less than half. It has to be half because if it's less than half, one side is big, one side is small. It will not go very far and will come off. It will be cut off easily. There are so many kinds of bamboo. Each kind of bamboo can be used different purpose, different way. For weaving, we have many kinds of bamboo that we can use for weaving. Many things we can make from bamboo in our life. If we have bamboo, we can have almost everything that we need in our life actually. It's very useful. We can make it very beautiful, very delicate. It can be anything. That's why I think bamboo can be the subject that we have to learn because in the near future, if we don't have plastic, how can we survive? So if we have bamboo, we don't care about plastic because bamboo helps humans to survive for many thousand years. We learn. We develop our wisdom for a long, long time. But now when we have plastic, we ignore the ancient wisdom. That means the wisdom about weaving bamboo. I think it's very important to learn. We can do anything, like a purse that's very delicate like this. Just learn how to make a strip, learn how to weave them. It's incredible.