Episode Details

A much-expanded edition of Grow Figs Where You Think You Can’t is coming this summer. For sneak peeks and updates, and to be the first to know when it’s available, click here.
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Wendy Kiang-Spray’s children don’t recognize canned bamboo shoots. That says a lot about the difference between fresh bamboo and its canned cousin.

Kiang-Spray, author of The Chinese Kitchen Garden, grew up eating fresh bamboo, one of the many crops her father grows in his large garden.

She talks about growing, harvesting, and cooking bamboo.

Grow Bamboo

There are two groups of bamboo:

• Running bamboos spread quickly by underground rhizomes.
• Clumping bamboos grow in clumps. 
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Kiang-Spray points out that running bamboo might not be suited to small yards—at least not without measures to contain it. “It would be a big mistake in my suburban backyard; all my neighbours would hate me,” she says, as she talks about how quickly running bamboos can spread. A running bamboo spread to her yard from a neighbour’s yard over 100 feet away…not exactly a slow-growing plant.

 A much-expanded edition of Grow Figs Where You Think You Can’t is coming this summer. For sneak peeks and updates, and to be the first to know when it’s available, click here.