Killer Bamboo

I am considering giving up my yearly attempt to grow a few vegetables in my backyard. This year for the first time, my cost-per-harvested-vegetable exceeded $50, and while I am a patriotic American who loves inflation in all of its many forms, this is not sustainable on the Atkins farm.

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If you are worried about what I am going to do with all of my spare time now that I have retired from the farm life, fear not. I still have my infestation to deal with. What I am talking about is my bamboo problem, and it is severe. None of my neighbors here on the south bank of the Etowah claim to know where or how it started, but about twenty years ago we began to see the occasional stalk of bamboo sneaking up on us down along the river. Now, two short decades later, we are inundated.

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Bamboo is one of those plants that looks pretty when it is on someone else’s property, like a magnolia tree or a wisteria vine. It stands tall, sways gently as it sighs in the breeze, and gives the impression that it has read several books on mindfulness. But do not be fooled. Behind that calm green exterior is a plant with ambition, one that has a wandering spirit and an appetite for destruction. It cannot be killed outright. You can cut it off at ground level and then burn the roots, and next year it will be back, and it will bring a friend. It is the General Sherman of the plant world; it shows up uninvited and destroys everything in its path.

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Over the years I have tried to come up with strategies to deal with my bamboo incursion. I read somewhere once that panda bears liked to eat it, so I reached out to the Atlanta Zoo, which at that time had some pandas on exhibit. I wasn’t even trying to sell it; I was more than willing to give it away if they would just send some boys up here in a truck and get it. As it turned out, pandas do like bamboo, but they don’t like the kind I have, which is actually sort of a metaphor for my life.

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After the disappointment of the finicky imported pandas, I looked into what other animals might eat the stuff, and it turned out that goats love it. This shouldn’t have been surprising, because they will eat rusty cans and old cars as well, but just as I was about to buy a nice goat or two, my AI Legal Assistant, Leon, informed me that because I lived in the city limits, I was not allowed to own a goat. Just as I was about to become discouraged, however, he shared the goat-loophole with me. He said—and I took him at his word because I wanted it to be true—that while I could not legally own a goat, I could rent all of the goats I wanted to, presumably because nothing is quite as swanky as a rental goat. So I rented a couple and put them down by the river.

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The next day when I went to check on them, they were gone. Their little collars with those miniature bells were lying on the ground next to a half-eaten stalk of bamboo, but there was no sign of them beyond that. Either they had escaped, or to add to my troubles, this was my first indication that I had that rarest of all bamboo varieties, the killer bamboo. Either way, I was just glad that I had taken full coverage on the goats. As it was, I lost my deposit.