Houston Woman Has the Internet Fearing for The Thing Growing Out of Her Yard: ‘You’ve Got 20 Minutes’

Invasive wildlife is never easy to deal with, and some make it into people’s lawns. Recently, TikTok has been buzzing about invasive bamboo and how the plant is a nightmare to get rid of. Abby Farber (@abbyfarber5) from Houston, Texas, showed a clip of a shoot growing out of her lawn. She was unsure of what it was, but TikTok immediately reacted with dread.

“While I’m at my garden, I look over, and I see something sticking up out of the ground,” Abby said. “First, I thought it was a branch from one of these trees that fell and impaled the ground,” she added. But then, the branch noticeably had green leaves, which made her realize it couldn’t be a tree.

When she panned the camera around, there was a strange stalk emerging from the ground. It was brown, and the tips had green leaves shooting out of it. The thing could have easily been mistaken for a branch, but it’s far from it.

It’s a bamboo shoot, and it’s aggressively growing in Abby’s lawn. Because she was curious to figure out what it was, she also did her reverse search to find out what plant was poking out of her property. The search also confirmed it was bamboo, which Abby found odd.

She didn’t plant any bamboos, but it was growing on her side of her fence.

Why is everyone on TikTok terrified of bamboo?

“Has anyone experienced this before? Where did this come from? Why is it growing out of the ground, and this is the only one? There’s nothing else,” she said in her clip. She peeled some of the protective layer of the plant off, and it revealed the distinct green stalk of a moso bamboo plant.

Moso bamboos are not native to the United States and are highly invasive. Because of their aggressive and quick root system expansion, it’s classified under “running” bamboo. Unlike other plants that need seeds to propagate, bamboo can multiply through their rhizome system. Their roots essentially sprawl underground, creating new shoots of bamboo in another area.

Although tough and tall, bamboo is technically a grass, not a tree. It’s better to think of it like Kentucky field grass or turf grass, which sprawls uncontrollably. Both plants share the same way of spreading from area to area.

Even though Abby didn’t plant bamboo on her property, her neighbor seems to have a few. If they are planted on the ground, their roots must have reached her yard—thus, why there’s a random shoot that grew out.

Needless to say, everyone in her comment section was horrified.

One wrote, “Your content is about to become nothing but you battling the bamboo.”

Somebody else said, “Girl you’ve got 20 minutes.”

And another exaggerated, “You should contact a realtor and try to sell your house by like 4-6 pm tonight if possible.”

Did her yard turn into a bamboo forest?

But battling bamboo that serious? One social media user who found Abby’s post gave some advice. They wrote, “As a person who battled bamboo for eight years, please listen to me. Immediately trench your yard at the fence line and bury a barrier immediately. It will protect your backyard from the runners. I cannot emphasize this enough to do this as soon as possible.”

For some people, they definitely believe that Abby is on the verge of a bamboo forest situation. If it comes to that, perhaps the only way to get rid of the bamboo is to ask China to send one of their giant pandas over.

Fortunately, Abby made an update and said that no other bamboo shoots appeared after the first one. She has already gotten rid of the shoot based on everyone else’s advice. However, her neighbor seems to have planted bamboo on the ground.

So, she doesn’t have a bamboo forest… For now.

(featured image: Abby Farber)

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