How to Dry and Cure Bamboo Poles
Once I cut the bamboo I needed to find a place to dry it, first I trimmed off the leaves and then I set up a drying station in my basement. It is nothing more than four cement post piers and two 6 foot sections of bamboo to hold all the bamboo poles off the ground.
From what I have researched, there are a couple ways people go about drying bamboo, you need to keep it out of the water and wet for 1-3 months because green bamboo contains a lot of sugars and starches so it will rot very easily.
Its best to either bake it, soak the starches out in a running creek, or soak it in chemicals as commercial bamboo processors do. I don’t have the facilities to do any of the above, so I just started to let it dry in my basement.
From what I read I will need to keep the basement full of bamboo for 3-12 weeks. I’ll probably keep the drying bamboo in my basement until the fall because I still have to make a place to build the dome and I have to do some more experimenting with aircrete as the Methican-Americans stole my tirolessa sprayer.
It seems like I have done a good job in learning how to dry and cure bamboo poles, as they are done and cut for my bamboo dome. I set them outside where I wanted to build the dome last spring, and promptly forgot about them. Now that it is October, I checked them, and they are still dry and sturdy.
