FOR my house, the lawn is a centimeter and a half high and is respectable. From the side it climbs about twenty meters and more! However, a six-meter grass is only a fraction of the height of a grass. Some varieties can grow up to 36 meters high and the stems up to 30 meters in diameter. And there is a climbing site that reaches sixty meters!
My house is on the edge of a thick bamboo, and bamboo is the largest member of the grass family. From the top floor of my house, I look at this forest of feathery grass. Butterflies dance on the "treetops". Birds rarely leave low light and shadow below. Only their conversations and their songs reveal that they are there.
Bamboo is more common in Asia. China alone cultivates more than 160 varieties. But bamboo also grows in the Western Hemisphere, from the southern United States to northern Chile and Argentina.
On the North Carolina coast, cattle graze bamboo. Their digestive processes destroy the poison that must be removed during cooking if people are to eat this herb safely. However, in India cows sometimes die eating the shoots of local varieties with great relish.
Many uses
Bamboo is more than food for humans and animals. Its uses are so numerous that it is said that the lives of Eastern peoples would change completely if bamboo did not exist.
You may have seen footage of hundreds of Chinese tugs in the rapids of the mighty Yangtze River in China. The rope they use is bamboo. The stress it can withstand is more than 10,000 pounds per square inch. It is almost as strong as steel! Indeed, bamboo is an excellent reinforcement of concrete.
An oriental sheep fishing on a bamboo boat. He catches the fish with a bamboo stick, puts his fish on a bamboo hook and can be protected with an umbrella with the bamboo rod.
At home, fish can be cooked in bamboo containers and eaten with bamboo sticks. Young bamboo shoots can be part of your diet. For drinking, you can wet the water with a bamboo pattern; water that can be transported home through a bamboo channel. After eating, you can clean your teeth with a bamboo stick and cool off with a bamboo fan.
The men's house itself can be made of bamboo, including the floors, walls and ceilings. Your furniture can be made of bamboo, not only the chair you sit on, but also the pots that hold the flowers in your garden. Maybe the broom you use to clean your house and garden rake is also made of bamboo, while bamboo grass nests on your property.
Chinese housewives often use bamboo leaves to wrap rice, cashews and pork or other dishes, just like a Chilean housewife uses corn straw, a Greek woman uses leaves of vine and other housewives stuff various foods into cabbage leaves. Ripe and dried bamboo leaves are also used to deodorize fish oils.
The use of bamboo seems to be endless. Liquid diesel fuel can be obtained from bamboo by distillation. Pharmaceutical companies use bamboo substances to make hormones and medicines. And the culture medium used to cure bacteria taken from a patient can come from an oriental bamboo forest!
Bamboo is categorized as glass?