When you move into a new house, you can be greeted with unexpected surprises.
Pleasant surprises might come in the form of items left behind that you can revive or repurpose, saving you money as you make a house a home.
But there can be not-so-pleasant surprises, as one homeowner found out shortly after moving in.
"I recently bought a house and I noticed as the weather started to warm up that my neighbors bamboo was rapidly growing into my yard," they captioned the post on the r/landscaping subreddit community. "Does anyone have tips on what to do in this situation?"
Accompanying pictures show green shoots poking out from a flower bed, with the neighbor's bamboo patch seen growing behind a separating fence.
It might seem like a manageable situation at first glance, but those who have dealt with bamboo before know that this could spell the beginning of a lot of work.
"It will be growing through your kitchen floor soon," one Redditor commented.
Indeed, bamboo has been known to grow rapidly and with surprising strength. In the United Kingdom, for example, unchecked bamboo spread under a house, and the homeowners needed to rip up the ground floor and excavate the plant's rhizomes with diggers — resulting in a bill in the region of $130,000 (£100,000), as the Guardian reported.
If our Redditor wants to avoid such a hefty bill, they'll want to get to work quickly.
Bamboo might seem like an attractive, natural way to provide a privacy screen between properties, but boundary fences aren't going to stop its roots from creeping through the soil.
It just goes to show why it's important to understand the properties of any plant before you add it to your garden — for both your and your neighbors' sakes. Several species of running bamboo are invasive in the United States, according to the University of Maryland Extension, including Phyllostachys, Pleioblastus, Pseudosasa, and Bambusa.
Native plants, on the other hand, are ideally suited to local soil and weather conditions and help to encourage the presence of vital pollinators. What's more, they require little maintenance and water, which can save you money on fertilizers and water bills when compared to keeping typical monoculture lawns healthy. Should these plants start growing over the other side of the fence, they'll be easier to deal with, too.
Redditors were sympathetic to the situation and shared their stories.
"My experience with bamboo is, it will find a way," one user said. "Those guys are insanely aggressive."
"This is what you'll need to do," another began. "You'll need to dig everything up completely though. If you don't clear out the rhizomes that are already in those beds, it will grow back."
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