After all the warnings that Bamboo will take over your yard if you let it, you'd think we'd have no trouble growing it, but despite buying large bamboo plants, they just don't seem to be adjusting well to our garden.

Not long after we planted them, they developed a black fungus, which we were able to cure, but they've just never taken off, and a year later, I'm wondering what else we can do. They're not too sickly looking, they're just not growing very fast.

We planted them in wine barrels, which are huge, but we got concerned at one point that they weren't draining properly. So we flipped over the barrels, gently laying our distressed bamboo on its site, drilled holes in the bottom of the wine barrels and tried to break up the soil a little. There isn't much room in the barrels for their roots to expand further, but they don't seem rootbound yet.

 A friend suggested grass fertilizer, which we added, and we water them pretty regularly.

 But, alas, our bamboo is growing slowly and with spring blossoming all over the rest of the yard, you'd think they'd be happy.

 What are we doing wrong?

There’s something about summer and growing tomatoes. Maybe it’s because they really only grow in the summer or because they taste so much better (so much better) than anything available in the stores, but there’s something really satisfying about a summer tomato you’ve grown yourself.

There are those, of course, who take their tomato growing to the extremes, such as the guy chronicled in the Los Angeles Times last year who grew something like 10,000 tomatoes in his San Fernando Valley yard. It was in reading that article that I discovered Tomatomania – no, not this particular gentleman’s mania for tomatoes, but the Tomatomania seedling sales, listed at www.tomatomania.com.