Plants as ecological embankment

Secret of good bamboo construction is availability of good bamboo. Not all bamboo is as strong as steel. There are many variables like age, culm diameter, wall thickness and moisture content. As modern bamboo construction in Nepal and most of South Asia, is in its embryonic stage, there aren’t many commercial suppliers who can provide quality grade bamboo. Today the commercial use of bamboo is for scaffoldings for which the concern for age, maturity is often overlooked by contractors. The contractors harvest anything they see, thus promoting a very unsustainable harvesting regime. For a long time we had planned to start our plantation but we never had the financial resources to do so. We could only limit ourselves to establishing a nursery where we have collected over 20 indigenous and exotic species of bamboo. We have two hectares of land where we started our nursery based on permaculture principle. Its obvious we love bamboo,  but we also realize over obsession of one plant could lead to development of monoculture as its happening in China. Thus we have collected hundreds of plants that have different nutritional, medicinal and utilitarian value in our model farm.