Rewilding My Lot

Since I moved here in February, there have been two significant water events when rain fell hard enough to move soil around. The second event last month allowed me to deduce more precisely how water moves across this property. In short, looking out into the back yard from the house, heavy rainfall moves from back right to front left, before exiting the lot and flowing down to the street drains.

My eventual goal here is to improve the soil and plant life here such that flash flooding is minimized or eliminated and as much water as possible is absorbed into the ground. The grade of the land will not be changed, but if water can be captured on its way through here, I want to do that.

Given that this goal of “sinking water” will probably take years, the shorter term goal is to be sure that I don’t lose soil if there is heavy rain. And if soil is moved, that it doesn’t travel as far as it has been doing. This will be significant when I start on my fall seeding plans, so that seeds stay more or less where I want them.

So yesterday I did two things that I hope will be helpful:

• Next door to the left hasn’t been turfed yet, but more sand has been added to that lot since I arrived. That gave me the structure I needed to increase the height of my makeshift “border wall” under the fence so that if soil does get washed in that direction it stays in the lot here. (Water will flow through my tiny stone wall and follow its assigned drainage path.)
• In the area on the left side of the lot where I planted native grass seeds in the spring (and then had them washed away) I have recreated my original mulch dike and added more mulch to subdivide the area. That may not prevent a severe flood event from washing things around, but it might restrict movement more than was happening before. And more mulch on the ground is no bad thing, given that in effect there is no topsoil here.

So a couple of hours and two bags of mulch later, I am ready for the next rain event to see what happens, and to determine whether I improved the erosion situation at all.

This is BEFORE:

And this is AFTER. The first three fence sections from the gate are the ones where there is no turf in the neighboring lot yet and that’s where I added more height to the stone wall. The region next to fence sections 3 & 4 from the gate is the lowest point and where water pools. The mulch dikes extend behind where this photo is taken as well.