Growing Bamboo from Seed

Growing bamboo from seed is the least attractive way to produce bamboo plants for commercial use. The main reason is quite simple, Guadua bamboo only flowers every 80 - 100 years!

On the positive side though, Guadua bamboo plants grown from seed have a life cycle of another 80 - 100 years, since bamboo is a Gregarious flowering grass (simultaneously flowering off all the bamboos of a single clone and subsequently die after seed setting).

More information about Guadua Bamboo seeds and how we collected them in 2009 can be found here: Guadua Bamboo seeds in Nicaragua.

1. Seed Preparation:

The collected seeds are properly cleaned and then dried in the sun for 1-2 hours. After that the seeds are soaked in clean ordinary water for 6-12 hours to break the dormancy. This water is drained out about 10-20 minutes before sowing.

2. Soil Preparation:

Good, dark soil is mixed with ashes (ex. from a barbecue) and wood chips (from unpainted, untreated wood). Rice husks are also a very good alternative for wood chips.

The mixture goes like this:

• 8 parts of top soil
• 1 part of ashes
• 1 part of fine wood chips

This mixture is then filtered through a wire mesh to get stones and soil debris out.

3. Planting Bamboo Seed

Spread the mixture out in a special plastic pellet and leave the soil nice and loose. DON’T COMPRESS IT!

Make small holes (3-4mm) where you will put the bamboo seeds. Drop one seed in each hole.

Cover the seeds gently with the soil mixture, so that the seeds sit at 4-5 mm deep.

Keep them wet!!! Give them water every day, in the early morning and again at night.
Let the seeds grow under partial shade.

Compared to other bamboo propagation methods, growing bamboo from seed is rather slow. The bamboo seeds start germinating after 15-25 days and outbreaks of thin and fragile leafs then start to show. The new seedlings, however, grow slowly because the underground part is initially not differentiated as rhizome, but as a fibrous, short and low anchor.

4. Bamboo Potting

When Guadua seedlings are of 3 – 4 months old, they have established a rhizome that will start to produce new sprouts. At this time they are transferred to poly pots and are irrigated once a day, preferably in the evening.

The poly pot should be filled with Farm Yard Manure (FYM), soil and sand mixture at the ratio of 2:3:1. The new Guadua plants are ready to be transplanted to their final destination once they reach 40-50cm.