Anyone had experience/sucess with preventing soil erosion with grasses/shrubs?

Ive just had a large area , around an acre excavated and know that it will have problems with erosion come the rains,I hoping to find a seed or plant to cover big areas quickly and minimise problems.

MATT!!!!!


over to you!!

Verdulaga? That spreads faster than anything, and I spend most of my time ripping it out.

You may not have to do anything. I clear a 1,000 metre garden of weeds twice a year and put down weed killer. That it needs doing twice a year should be explanation enough.

Apart from the fast-growing weeds, I have some productive orange, pear, peach, apricot and pomegranate trees. They flower and produce fruit whenever it suits them, all year round.

Have a look around what is growing in your area on hillsides. There is a lot of wild pink and white Oleander growing on hillsides and river banks in the campo on the CDS. Prickly pear cactus. Then there are plants they put in motorway banking to hold the soil together but don't know what they are called.

Yeah, but just remember this. Anything you introduce, you may wish to remove one day, and battling with chumbera is probably the last thing you will want to do.

Sadly, the more help it might be to you in what you need, the more likely it will be to be a damn nuisance in the future.

What do you want to grow there? There are loads of "soil stabilisers"

I dont want to grow anything, its a very steep embankment and I just want to stop it being washed away when we get heavy rains , it`s poor quality sub soil so weeds dont grow that fast/well ,I could water it during the hot months if necessary.

Well I can give you the quick way or I can give you the proper way... Plants might help in the short term but the second you get a big rainfall or it dries out too much then rains you will get runoff.

So the proper ways is ?

It needs to be stabilised with some sort of mesh or netting, there are many on the market, I personally use a system called Platypus, its a steel netting that is attached to driven spikes in the bank. This helps stabilise the ground and it can then be planted up to encourage further stabilisation.

Another good way, and probably one of the most effective ones, is to terrace the bank, you wont need to make massive steps into it, just a simple cut back and shore up of the facing wall is all thats needed.

I'm in and out all day today but when I have 10 mins I will go through the techniques and methods and you can decide what ones are best for you. OK?

Standing by,many thanks.

Right... There are a few ways to stabilise a bank. Plants are always given as a viable option but the problem with plants is that just using them is not that effective, you can't guarantee that all the plants will take for one, which means you will have gaps, gaps won't give you stability. Secondly if it rains while you are waiting for the plants to establish then you will lose some of them to the runoff, which will then cause gaps.. and that won't help. Plants will help with bank stabilisation but they help in an unusual way, what they actually do is absorb much of the moisture and draw it down to their roots, this means that less water is threatening your bank, the roots themselves won't stop the runoff, its the action of absorption that does that, but even the plants are at risk if you get a proper downfall, this is because they can't absorb all that is being thrown at them, they can't cope with the quantity and as a result you will end up with the soil eroding from underneath and that will mean much of your soil will be lost and then your plants will start to be knocked back and may well die.
The other option is to net or mesh the whole bank. Now this can be done with a specialist matting, maybe even some landscaping terram, its the black stuff you see sometimes in commercial beds. This will cover the whole area and you can then cut slots into the fabric to allow planting. This will mean your plants will be protected underneath the terram, the bulk of the water will simply run off and your bank will be semi protected. The obvious problems with this system is it doesn't look good for a while and you will need some tough plants to deal with the increased heat, reduced water and generally quite a hostile environment. There are some very expensive bank systems, they can range from the system I have used before which is the Platypus system. Its quite complicated to explain but its sort of a spiders web system that attaches to pins that are driven into the bank. Its an incredible system and is extensively used on motorways to hold back whole cliffs. It really is an amazing system but at around £45 a square meter its not cheap!
If you want a nice simple option I would go for chicken wire. Yeah I know, I could well have just said that at the start but I wanted to show what could be done. Lay the chicken wire out flat across the whole bank in strips. They can be horizontal or vertical its up to you, but if you go horizontal make sure your strips overlap at least a couple of feet and lay it like you would felt, with the top run overlapping the lower run... I hope that makes sense. This while thing needs to be pinned down. The cheapest and best option is to use tent pegs. Drive them in every few feet, make sure the laps are well pegged down then put soil or rocks over the edges of the netting, or maybe, if you want to get fancy, run strips of netting on the sides to finish it off. Once this is down, and it needs to be DOWN VERY TIGHT, you can then start either pushing plants into the gaps in the netting every foot or so or you can cut slots in it and do the same.
For plants I know there have already been some suggestions but why not try something different? The very best plant I can suggest to stabalise anything is Ivy. Yeah I know, its a climber, but there is no hard written law to say it has to climb anything, and anyone who has ever tried to remove ivy will contest to the fact that they are very well rooted! You could even try some of the other climbers to make it pretty, maybe a bougainvillia, or even the star jasmine.

Never thought of ivy. That's a real rooter and spreader for sure.

Over the last year I have been watching the cuts on the motorway where it goes between Chicllana and Vejer, and without exception all the bare soil slopes have slipped, sometimes so badly that it has slid onto the road.

Makes me wonder why the cuts were all made so steep. They are now having to go back and face the slopes with rock to stop it happening again this winter.

These are guys I was talking about, its amazing stuff!

http://www.platipus-anchors.com/eart...8_wadworth.pdf

I have always tried to look at things differently Bil, if you look at a problem in a lateral way a logical solution can always be found.