No - there's just one fellah (husband) doing the felling, with teenage son for extra muscle power. We'd have to hire a stump grinder. Would that be the best thing to do?

Thanks

Laura

Thanks for the advice. The bamboos that we have a

fargesia nitida 'Jiuzhaigou'
fargesia robusta
phyllostachys glauca,
phyllostachys aureosulcata f. spectabilis
phyllostachys nigra

The area is about three metres by eight metres with lawn in front and a field fence (and stumps) behind. It's some distance from the house and in a landscape that won't be overwhelmed by the final scale of some of these.

Can I restrain the possibly rampant phyllostachys by kicking down encroaching culms (as I have been told) or is that ineffective? Barriers?

Thanks

Laura

Hi Laura, My feelings are that if your planning on planting bamboo, I wouldnt worry too much as bamboo are not fussy. If you wanted to take out the stumps, I would remove the tops of these conifers, leaving about 6-8ft of the trunks and then using a monkey winch, winch out these stumps using the trunks to attach the cable and pull them over ! you can hire these winches quite cheaply and its not very hard to use them, use the strongest trunk (or a tree if one is near enough) as the anchor but as I said, its not necessary in my opinion to remove the roots if your planting bamboo !
Lannerman.

Very interesting idea - thank you. We have a very large and sturdy beech which we could use as an anchor point for a monkey winch. Or we could just ignore the stumps and plant the bamboo.

Thanks again,

Laura