My old garden (14'x60') has two problems, on the left side where I've been growing green vegetables I have a terrible bamboo problem. On the right side where I've been growing tomatoes I have a wilt problem. I have a new garden (15'x20') this year so I'm planning on letting at least part of my old garden lay fallow. I'm going to solarize the tomato side to kill the wilt pathogens. I've been using roundup on the bamboo but it's never been able to eliminate it. I was wondering if solarization would kill bamboo? It's supposed to be pretty effective against weeds as well as pathogens so it might work. On the other hand the bamboo might just punch it's way through the plastic.
One more question about solarization in general, does it work in New England? The papers I see on the web are from UC Davis. Ma is a lot cooler than Ca. For solarization to work it needs to get the soil temperature pretty high, will it get high enough here?