Ten Tons of Work

So finally we did it.  After saying we needed to do it, David stopped by a rock yard and ordered ten tons of rip rap, supposedly in a 6-8 inch size.  David first thought about ordering seven tons, but decided just to be safe, he would go with ten.  He had planned to have them back it across the yard, closer to its destination, but the water company was concerned the truck would damage the water line running just a foot in from the edge of the road. Rather than wait until they could put in a steel plate, we just had them dump it at the edge of the road.

So, here you can see where it was dumped. Below that juniper hedge, at the edge of the ravine is where it is going, about fifty feet away, and over the edge.  Possibly you can see the bright red trunks of the red twig dogwoods that a nursery and I had planted along the sides, hoping they would sucker out and hold the soil.  Little did I know, the nursery did not plant the suckering type, and in matching their variety, nothing was holding anything much in place.  The heavy steel pipe was put in by the previous owner, and water running out had created a gully.  We had a nursery put in the black plastic pipe and run that down to the bottom.  It worked most of the time, but often the plastic disconnected.  Last fall, when eight inches of rain fell in three days, it had come off, and washed out another foot of soil.  The end of the steel pipe was at my shoulder when I stood in the gully below.

We carried rock and dropped it in place Saturday morning (after finally signing papers to refinance the mortgage - a process started last October!) then Saturday afternoon, then Sunday afternoon.  We took it slowly and carefully, watching how we moved and several times I used some yoga stretches when my muscles started cramping up. 

So on Sunday evening, at 5:30, we got it done.  To give you some sense of how much rock is in the ravine, the metal pipe sits just above the rock where it comes out from the ground, and the plastic pipe is now a couple of feet above the rock at the pipe.  It is a lot of rock!  I tried to protect the dogwoods from damage, but one was smashed to pieces by where I had to drop the rocks over the edge.  Others had various degrees of damage, but nothing deadly.  I will go in and prune them back, so they will sucker up with new growth above the rock.  So, just one final picture from the bottom so you can see how those ten tons look when filling in an erosion gully.