Paso Bamboo Farm & Nursery

Posted: 8:16 am, July 13, 2013 by Publisher Scott Brennan

Paso Bamboo owner Gavino Villa

Paso Bamboo Farm & Nursery in North County

Bamboo can solve new landscape realities

In our rural North County area, we must expect more out of our landscapes today. Besides providing beauty, functionality and practicality, we desire drought-tolerant, deer-resistant, sustainable and supportive landscapes more earth/ecology/environmentally-friendly. Home and business owners must be aware of new realities and deal with them appropriately.

Bamboo, not the first word many might think of, surprisingly can be one of the answers to the above concerns – bamboo is water-wise and more. Bamboo, a member of the grass family Poaceae, is a perennial evergreen, and gaining popularity especially with features highly desirable for ecologically sustainable environments.

Paso Bamboo Farm & Nursery is working hard to provide the North County, actually the entire Central Coast, with all the unique creative garden bamboo they could desire. Bamboo, with its elegant beautiful stature, can be part of landscape solutions sought by home gardeners to contractors and landscape designers for today’s changing weather/water realities.

Paso Bamboo Farm & Nursery Owner Gavino Villa, Chief Bambusero, and his family spend their days planting, cultivating, managing, refining and improving many varieties of bamboo.

How did Paso get so lucky to have our very own Paso Bamboo Farm & Nursery, the only bamboo farm between Vista and Aptos California?
As a young man, Gavino was fascinated with bamboo. He first turned his interest into a hobby, then into a part-time business while keeping his full-time Lockheed Engineering position.

Several years ago, moving his family from the Bay area, he bought 40 acres on North River Road in Paso Robles, bringing many plants with him; he started with 60 different varieties. He experimented to find those varieties that acclimated well to our cold winters and hot summers and has established the 10 best species for inland plantings plus other species that work well in our coastal regions. Recently Gavino has been able to devote his full attention and time to his bamboo farm and nursery.

Gavino’s vision is for bamboo to be more commonplace and included in initial landscape designs and for re-designs/improvements. This is truly a family-business with wife Fani as Chief Accountant, daughters Victoria and Mariela and son Xavier – all gladly working to support the business.

What advantages can bamboo offer?

On a large scale, bamboo encourages and supports effective water reclamation projects as it can help transform polluting components into plant nutrients because of high nitrogen consumption. It can help with erosion control, can reduce runoff, sustain water areas from riverbanks to ponds, and help to retain water in a watershed area all the while requiring little attention once established.
Bamboo also minimizes CO2 gases and can generate 35% more oxygen than any equivalent stand of trees, can be harvested over and over with no replanting and is “the” fast-growing canopy for re-greening degraded lands. Bamboo promotes healthy ecosystems.

For home and businesses owners, a major improvement offered by bamboo is its use in creating privacy screening or shielding unwanted views. There is much practicality in using a fast-growing, easily controllable, vertical bamboo fence that affords you “no views” of the neighbor’s second floor bedroom window. If you are surrounded by neighbors on three sides and desire more seclusion, a bamboo “fence” can be so right adding beauty and privacy together. Businesses with water tanks or less attractive buildings or equipment can use bamboo to shield them from view. Bamboo once established uses significantly less water.

Shading a home/business with bamboo can also reduce solar influx and energy costs – a tall beautiful bamboo fence on the side of a building will shade and cool – the air conditioning system doesn’t have to work as hard. Create yourself a three-sided bamboo outdoor room and you will entertain/relax outside even in hot weather.

Bamboo easily blends in with all types of architecture and if you have always wanted a tropically-planted bamboo-paradised back yard/pool area/tasting room amenity – maybe even a Tiki lounge – a trip to the Paso Bamboo Farm & Nursery and a Gavino-inspired consultation will get you started.

Genus Species found at the Paso Bamboo Farm include four Giant Timbers – Vivax Timber, Henon and Rubro capable of reaching local heights of 40’+ tall. Originating in China, someone wanting a spectacular wind barrier, frontage road planting or privacy screen can choose Vivax and literally watch new culms grow a foot a day! Of the five Exotics available, the Yellow Groove Crooked Stem makes a great privacy screen candidate reaching 25’ – fascinating with the zigzagging culms at the bottom, yet, maintaining its very tall, very upright branches. Temple Bamboo is a more formal-looking bamboo that can also grow to 18’, making it perfect for a bamboo avenue or to line an entry driveway. When exposed to the sun, the culms take on a beautiful crimson-tint.

These varieties are a small sample of what one can choose, at the Bamboo Farm. Gavino loves to take visitors on a tour pointing out general bamboo features and then identifying specific species that will meet the particular needs of a customer. He extols its beauty and uniqueness to complete a landscape vision from the planning through the installation. And in today’s new “climate”, consumers can further appreciate bamboo’s shallow-root system’s effective use of less water.

Visitors to the Paso Bamboo Farm will discover as they walk through the various bamboo grooves – it is shady and considerable cooler within the groove. The rustle of the bamboo culms and leaves is peaceful and restful, just looking upward through the magnificent vertical growth is spirit-filling. Home/business owners can make use of bamboo for similar effects.

Water and land conservation, beauty, support for ecological sustainability – bamboo provides these benefits throughout San Luis Obispo County and beyond especially meeting new landscape realities in the North County.

Call for a Bamboo Tour and prepare to be captivated, impressed, soothed and cooled. Paso Bamboo Farm & Nursery is located at 5590 North River Road, Paso Robles. Contact Gavino Villa, Chief Bambusero, at 805-712-1759. E-mail: gavino@pasobamboo.com. Dianne Timmerman, recently signed on as Bamboo Promoter, can reached at 805-238-3802 or 805-423-7543. Her E-mail: dianne@pasobamboo.com.