What's an edible grassy plant to another edible grassy plant? As asparagus also spreads and moves a bit, planting it near the sweet shoot bamboo provides a two layer effect that is visually pleasing while providing more food in the same amount of space. 

Surprisingly shade tolerant, strawberries will run happily in and out of your sweet shoot bamboo, protecting the ground from the harsh summer sun and allowing both plants to soak up the maximum amount of water with every rain or watering session. 

Those thick bamboo roots are excellent for helping to keep the soil loose for the formation of these delicious root vegetables. 

Highly shade tolerant, somewhat cold tolerant to zone 8, growing this perennial summer spinach beneath a canopy of sweet shoot bamboo can help to protect it during the winter to help ensure its survival. This combination works best when the Sweet Shoot bamboo and Sissoo Spinach are supported by growing crops of beans to add additional nitrogen to this soil while the Sissoo Spinach itself acts as a ground cover to help protect the soil and maintain moisture for both edible plants.

When fertilizing by hand is nto the order of the day, growing Fava Beans also known as Broad Beans around your patch of Phyllostachys Dulcis will not only offer a beautiful contrast to the hard, olive culms of the Sweet Shoot Bamboo during the cooler seasons, but will provide additional nitrogen to help the development of more roots for the ever-hungry bamboo plant.

For when you need a hardy perennial that works as hard as your Sweet Shoot Bamboo does, choose the Taro plants. With its edible leaves and edible tubers, you can grow a lot of food in the same amount of space. Taro provides the additional benefit of being a self-mulching plant, like the bamboo, to even more quickly increase the amount of humus in the soil surrounding your Sweet Shoot Bamboo plant and improving the growing environment for both of these edible plants.