Due to weather and work, "week 2" is a slight exaggeration. It's been 2 full days and 2 half days of work. (Last Saturday and today were full days; Sunday and Monday were half days.) And I'm really happy with our progress:
The parking area is almost completely cleared! There's just a narrow strip along the fence on the left. Georg and I worked for a couple of hours this morning, then after lunch he had to go to the radio station so I worked alone all afternoon.
We're still using the same method: cut the stalk close to the ground and immediately press a sponge soaked with Roundup against the cut end. It's slow going as opposed to, say, spraying the entire area with Roundup, waiting a few days and then chopping it down with a machete. That would be the easy way. I'm happy with this approach because so much less Roundup is used. Using a sponge there's almost no excess Roundup going into the ground.
I had expected an explosion of new bamboo shoots during the past week: bamboo is infamous for fast growth, cutting a plant back always encourages new growth, that whole area is getting way more sun than before, and we had heavy rain early in the week. I thought we'd spend a long time this morning cutting new shoots, before we could get back to clearing the older growth. To my surprise we didn't get that at all. There were a few new shoots, I found maybe about a dozen and a half. And all of them were in the area we were newly clearing today, none where it had already been cleared. Maybe the Roundup really is slowing it down?
The massive pile of cut bamboo has grown even more massive. We're planning to shred it, though I'm not sure if we need to let it dry out first. Our shredder is fussy about bamboo: it can cut stalks but jams up on leaves. I guess we'll just have to try a fresh stalk and see how the shredder does. We can put the leaves in the compost pile.
A couple of unpleasant discoveries today: first, the retaining wall which had been hidden behind the bamboo for years is in serious disrepair. I wonder how difficult it will be to fix.
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