Garden subsiding into the ditch

[Simon T]

There's a ditch runs along the back of my garden, trouble is the edge of the garden appears to be subsiding into it.

Difficult to show in a photo, but you can just about see the edge crumbling away (ignore the bits of wood on the floor, doing some tinkering with the fence)

To the right of the pic, you can just about see where the neighbour has piled a load of topsoil down the ditch to try and build it back up where it borders his property.

So, any decent suggestions as to how to stop the end of my garden disappearing? Is it a case of copying the neighbour and dumping tons of soil down the side to try and build it back up?

Thanks in advance!

[Andrew Gabriel]

You could build a proper retaining wall (needs to be properly designed). Plants can achieve a similar effect by their roots sewing the bank together. You have that tree, but you want a mixture of sizes - smaller ones (shrubs, hedge) will hold the surface together, the tree is deeper. What's the height differential between your lawn and bottom of the ditch? Do you own the ditch?

[Andrew Mawson]

'Tis natures way - everything eventually washed flat!

You need to revet the embankment somehow. On your small scale (*) I would hammer in chestnut spiles every two foot or so, and back them with timber such as fence gravel board or scaffold planks forming a stop for the washing away of the earth. Then back fill and encourage the herbage to cover it. Chestnut is a good compromise between longevity and price. Chestnut spiles are easily available from rural fencing outfits as they are the uprights of choice for stock fencing due to their 20 odd year life.

AWEM

(*) large scale you would use galvanised or stainless gabions (wire cages) filled with large pebbles to form a retaining yet water permeable retaining wall.

[Eric]

Stick a few railway sleepers along the edge. Stop them falling into the ditch with angle iron posts. Or make up some Gabion baskets.

Tipping soil in will eventually block the ditch and you'll get flooding problems.

[Nightjar]

You can buy a specific seed mix for stabilising embankments:

Colin Bignell

[fred]

In article , Simon T writes

Gabions.

You'll need a mini digger to dig out the earth but from then on it's pretty straightforward, hand placing of contents is best. Shame the tree is so close but I reckon you could get away with using 0.5m or 0.75m square boxes by 1m or 1.5m or so length. Looks like it's a metre or so deep, step back the top one a little.

Buy ready made (flat pack) cages, it's not worth trying to DIY them.

[Tim Watts]

On Friday 03 May 2013 17:42 fred wrote in uk.d-i-y:

I was surprised, but ToolSatan sell them:

[harry]

Plant trees. Willow are ideal. You can cut them down every few years for firewood.

[Chris Hogg]

Angel)

by this site

Good suggestion. You don't even need to use rooted plants as such. Plant whips (aka slips or rods). These are just living thin stems, which are inserted into a 12" deep hole in the soil made with a crowbar or similar. Couldn't be simpler. Fast growing, too.

See

and click on the 'living willow hedge' tab on the LHS for full details of how to do it; they also supply the whips. May be a bit late for this year, best done when they're dormant, but it has been a late spring....

I have no connection with them BTW.

[fred]

In article , Tim Watts writes

How bizarre, they are stocking some strange stuff the days. The sizes are a bit poncey and the prices seem high for the size but that is the kind of idea.

From experience, cage length of twice the square cross section makes for a good immovable component size (although they're always tightly wired together before filling). I think I used 0.75msq by 1.5m long, split into 2 x 0.75m cube compartments to stop the contents shifting under load. With the stream in the ditch it will be safer to completely fill with all rocks greater than mesh size to prevent wash out.

[Brian Gaff]

You really need some kind of retaining wall to keep the soil up or it will keep on goin into the ditch. Round here some horses got into trouble due to this effect and could not get out as the banks were effectvily swamps by then. They seemed to fix it with wood stakes going in quite deep and planks on the side away from the ditch. Quite how long wood would last I'm not too sure, but its been there several years already.

The stream floods when its very wet of course which is why these things happen in the first place.

Brian

[Simon T]

If you include the 20cm of water in the bottom of the ditch, I'd say about

1mtr 60cm.

Of course, that's directly vertical, the ditch wall is at an angle.