3. Housing & Enclosures

Bamboo can also keep our livestock housed and where we put them. From bird cages to goat pens, and even for the live otter and primate trade in parts of the world, it’s been doing so for centuries. We can create full sheds and barns out of it, using either the lap-roof, tile or thatching styles for roofs. We can also create fish traps and boxes of various types.

4. Construction

This is a method used around the world. Places like Nepal to  Thailand, bamboo gets used for long-term construction on a regular basis.

The most effective roofing style is the split overlap that prevents drips, although roofing is also done with mats and thatching styles using bamboo stalks and leaves. In many cases where load-bearing is an issue, you’ll find bamboo bundled into pillars and pillars closer than we use in 2×4 stick construction.

 

5. Water wheels & Irrigation

Bamboo is used as running waterways to lift relatively small amounts of water up into aqueduct-style irrigation systems or through channels or piping to cisterns – which either hold it or are used to create pressurized tanks to then distribute that water elsewhere.

Bamboo is also used to build mills that Westerners are more accustomed to seeing. Those mills can be used to do work directly – like threshing and grinding grain – or to spin low-level turbines for pumps or generating energy.

Similar designs for slow-moving fish wheels exist as well, spinning in rivers and streams and using scoops to drop fish into catchments. They’re not super efficient, but like a yoyo, they’re fishing while we’re off doing something else.

If we have running water, we can use some of those eons-old construction methods to make our lives easier.

 

Have you used Bamboo for any of these reasons or do you have other ideas for ways to utilize this natural resource? Thaks to our friends over at The Prepper Journal for this.