Making an artificial creek bed to solve drainage problems and improve look of a wet spot in the lawn

see bus hi Gary with moat right I just wanted to show you a little project that we're working on today actually probably be a two day job but how customer we've been here we're starting a landscape renovation for them this is gonna be probably a three phase project the first one being just clean up mulch the house and we are what I wanted to show you is we're gonna rework this natural drainage area that they have in the front yard so over this way I've started to measure and I've started to take a couple preliminary measurements to kind of show you what we've got going on here so over here you can see where the water drains and you know it's pretty dry right now it's July supposed to get a little rain but generally when the water comes through here it comes through spring and fall they usually have a slow trickle almost all the time and you can see the water sorta erodes the landscaping over here so it kind of makes its own path that it comes this way and and then it sort of puddles up here in the low spots you know it makes its own erosion back in these areas through here so what we're gonna do as you can see I've painted some lines on this and it meanders all the way down through here and it kind of comes into the woods and a lot of times it you know it makes for hard foot traffic and things like that in this area and you know this whole bottom section through here stays wet almost all spring and fall so what we're gonna do is reroute this a little bit we're going to add some stone to the bottom of it and give the water a proper channel to come through we want it to be a lot more symmetrical first thing I did there was mark my centerline then from the centerline I measured out each way that way we can make a more symmetrical instead of going wide like this out and around I kind of narrowed it so it'll flow quicker and smoother through there and hopefully that'll alleviate all the wetness they get over on this side and that natural channel as I dig this dirt out I'll put over here to raise the elevation that way you know it helps funnel the water in that area same thing but not as bad on this side of the driveway and it just kind of comes through here starts up this direction so basically we're gonna have a continual sort of swale through this way and the pipe will carry down the driveway and then it's gonna come through like this in the future we're gonna take out and you see some of this area's already been cultivated but that's going to become grass grass that will meander from the top all the way down for this year we're gonna end up just cleaning up a lot of this stuff pruning cleaning and mulching but probably phase two would be next year and we're gonna take out most of their front landscaping here all the overgrown plants and ivy and we're going to replant some things that I've suggested for the customer so you know today the big project is going to be digging this out and tomorrow we're gonna be putting some of the stone in and we'll show you how we do that step-by-step so keep watching well just about got it all dug out however we just got hit with some rain you can see now that the new creek bed I've dug out it's definitely flowing some water you know we got here it was almost dry luckily I got most of it dug out I had about three more feet to finish there before it came through and now it's basically running water luckily we got a lot of this accomplished so we'll have to come back and wait for this dry out and come back in a couple days try to finish it out try to regrade the outsides and what mom [Music] all right so we're back here at the creek bed project and it's been a couple days as you saw on the last clip there it started raining really hard when we were digging it out we got about 90% of the way there I've been waiting for it to dry out some it's still kind of soggy but I think we can get some work done so we're back here as you can see behind me here I have the cobbles that we're gonna put in the creek bed the pretty good size somewhere anywhere from about an inch to five inches in diameter need something kind of big so it doesn't wash down I had recommended to the customer that that we would maybe put some larger boulders through the creek bed at this time I guess the budget wasn't there so we're gonna skip the bigger boulders and cross our fingers hope that the Creek Creek run doesn't wash it down so let's take a look at what we're doing right now and we'll go from there so you see we've got some of the landscape cleaned up like we talked about we've managed to get that done over the days at the creek was wet so you know our Creek has been washed out quite a bit you can see the areas that I dug out and you know I set some of the bigger boulders off to the side dug it out still kind of muddy and standing water especially down towards the end where we didn't quite finish over here we're getting started on the high side I've got some commercial landscape fabric this is big roll that you can get a landscape supply store and I've laid it tear through the creek bed now what I've done is you know if you're gonna put this in here landscape beds it has to be pretty smooth over here we just want to watch for some of these folds but I've put it down through the creek area that we're gonna landscape or we're gonna put the creek run the cobbles on top of anywhere that there's a curve or a corner you know this stuff is in a six foot wide roll this Creek is it's gonna be four foot wide most of it so as you make a turn and wants to bind up so what you'll see is I just cut a slit I overlapped this as I go now notice I've overlapped it in the direction that the water flows across it I don't want to do it the other way you know in case the gravel shifts or whatever the Cobo shift I don't want that to peel up on the same note there as I've done this you can kind of see on the ends I've folded it under and you want to do that so that your your ends you know you're extra because this is a six foot wide roll so I've ordered about a foot of this underneath I wanted to make sure I had enough so I didn't get a four foot roll I got the six foot one just because there's a couple wide spots I wanted to also make sure that you know in areas where the banks higher and goes up like this I have enough room instead just set it in the bottom I do however want to keep this so that it's you know a few inches away from where the actual edges that way you know as the stuff washes and grows in you don't get this stuff to creep up and you get this scraggly looking landscape fabric you see that sometimes when when people put it too close to the edge so I've lined this Creek this top portion of the creek with it anywhere that there's a turn I just cut a slit say in the in the concave section or just cut a slit and then I'll overlap it that way to hold it in place you'll use something like this these are landscape fabric staples in here up in the corners I'll probably leave them in ground space off from the creek so I just push them in you'll probably just leave them in you know where you don't want this stuff to peel away so I'll put them down the edges to hold the fabric while I'm putting the cobbles in place you can see as I got up here towards the end I put a few of them in just to hold it while working and then as I got down here I just threw some rocks on top that way it holds it down now you may go down the edge and put them you know every foot or two way you know if your Kabul doesn't come all the way up to the edge it'll hold that other than that just put these where you need it to hold it in this situation if you're doing a regular landscape bed then you would put these guys in or every couple feet just to hold your fabric down that way it doesn't peel up over time I know if you do much landscape work you've been to projects where they've tried to use this as a weed mat fabric and over time it just pops up but it comes through the mulch and that's because of the poor installation this is a commercial-grade fabric it's really pretty thick stuff it's not plastic it's more of an actual fabric and it's tough you can cut it easily with a knife or scissors you know I just use a utility knife so you can cut it pretty easily with a utility knife or scissors I would not recommend plastic it breaks down the UV Sun you know rays hit it and it comes apart into pieces it's not environmentally friendly this will last a long time matter of fact it's guaranteed I think 15 years so so we're working this in sections as soon as we get some cobble in here I'll kind of show see we've put the River stones down through that's a better look at this Bank that we dug out and made it nice now one thing I wanted to show you through here is as you saw on the video where it caught us with rain for the day it was washing through here pretty hard all the way up through here I mean it was running pretty hard so you can see we've done the bank pretty tall we've got I don't know on this side over here probably about a foot and over on this side probably about four inches of height between the creek bed plus all the stone will settle in some you can see that the stone we've used here are cobbles and there are different sizes everything down from about four to five inches in size down to about an inch in size and right now you can kind of tell they're really dirty so [Music] they're super dirty so what you don't see right now is right now they look kind of a monotone gray color but really that's just the dirt on him what you'll find is that after they've been rained on and the creek runs through a couple times it'll wash these and as it washes them you'll see a lot of color come out and then you'll see you know Browns and reds and oranges and some granite pieces you'll see a lot of variation because of the natural Creek stone that this is dug from this is expensive product believe it or not it's probably the most expensive product you'll get at the gravel pit on the other hand what I've done through here is I've put a layer and this is area we haven't finished yet you can see where the cobble stops and the to start so I've done over here is I've put just crushed tubes the reason I did this is because I wanted to give a base layer of tubes 2 or 3 inches the tubes because there are angular crushed kind of product and you could see the flow that this this has when it rains hard so this crushed product my hope is gonna be that it holds the rounds in place some you know as the creek comes through this crushed isn't gonna wash down so I put a layer of crushed tubes down on the bottom you know like I mentioned before the customer was gonna have large boulders throughout I still recommended that maybe as an afterthought if they want to come back but you know you can put some boulders here some around the edges especially where the water comes through the channel and that'll help break the water flow so it doesn't wash quite as much also to look really cool if we do that we've got a couple larger stones that we've pulled out before we started the project but you know I'd like to have a lot more maybe this size which is probably a couple hundred pounds you know we've got some smaller like ten pounders or something ten or twenty pounders but that isn't really want I'd like some boulders like this no we could scatter through so as we're done since is this all we have we're just going to put these towards the inlet right here to break some of the water we're gonna go for me okay so I'm gonna fill you in one more time on our progress here we've just about got it knocked out got the rest of my crew over here and we're just gonna put some stroll down to finish it but we've got all the gravel in and let me show you what it looks like now yeah we're gonna take a look let's take a look at the finished product as you can see we've got all the cobbles in place we graded it out nice put the large boulders back in now you can see we put some straw on the hillside we'd like to come back I was just talking to the customer about putting some netting on this because obviously if we get some hard rain for the next few weeks there's a potential that it could wash which kind of worries me a little bit the banks all packed in pretty well and there's a lot of two's mixed in with the bank however put the straw in obviously to hold all the loose topsoil in place hopefully after watching this project it's been helpful for you and it'll give you some ideas on your drainage situations if you need any projects done some creative landscaping you can always call us at mulch right we can take care it for you or you can keep watching our videos and come up with some ideas of your own thanks a lot for watching

Channel: Columbus Landscapers

Views: 121,270

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Id: 148SyZrEqnw

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020