CONTROLLING EROSION

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Planting. Once you've stabilized the bottom of the gully, graded the slopes, and reduced the flow of water, you have completed the mechanical aspects of controlling the gully.

Now you should plant. Use the previously mentioned routine of temporary planting followed by permanent planting. Don't plant anything in the bottom until the silt has collected into terraces. Then you can plant moisture-loving trees right in the silt, where they'll usually thrive.

Maintenance. Remember the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike, held back the ocean, and became a culture hero to all five-year-olds? I don't suggest you spend all next spring with your finger in a check dam, but the Dutch-Boy Principle still holds: Small leaks can be easily plugged. Sometimes all that is necessary is for you to shove a few pine boughs in at the right place. If you do, silt will continue to collect. If you don't, the leak will often get bigger and bigger, bringing the whole dam down. You should also check to see that the mulch is still in place, the grass has germinated well, and no heavy flow of water is entering the gully. Visit your check dams as often as you can during the first one or two seasons to see how well they are holding up and to solve minor problems before they grow.

Culverts. Culverts are pipes that bring water under a road or trail. They are responsible for thousands of gullies in every state. Road engineers have a strange idea that if they install these culverts at a steep pitch, the water will flow through them very fast and keep the culverts clean of debris. Road engineers really get turned on by "self-cleaning" or "self-maintaining" culverts. But as I've already mentioned, the fast flow of water increases its erosive powers many times over. And often at the dump end of the culvert you will find a huge gully.

If there is already a gully, you have no choice but to go ahead with the gully trip. But if you can catch the problem early, the best thing you can do is dump a lot of rocks, broken asphalt, or cement rubble under where the culvert lets out. This will break the force of the water, acting much like an apron beneath a check dam. If you do this wherever you have a culvert, you will save a lot of aggravation and a lot of soil as well.

Afterwards. I don't want to minimize the fact that controlling a gully is hard work. But it is necessary work, and in the long run extremely satisfying.

Once you have brought a gully under control, watch it closely and uncritically. You may be in for a surprise. Some of the most beautiful places I know are old, stabilized gullies. When you are fighting a gully, you are primarily fighting erosion damage. But you are also creating a shady, potentially lovely, miniature canyon which will collect. moisture, support many plants, and become a wonderful refuge for wildlife. Turning a barren gully into a lush pocket of life is the nearest a human being can come to an oyster, which turns its injuries into pearls.

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