Go to the FDM Canada SiteHow to Build DIY Creek Bed
Anytime you have a lot of sheet water coming off of large properties. You’ve got a lot of water coming down into an area and it’s doing property damage because when water is moving at a high rate of speed, when it’s got a lot of velocity and there are hundreds, maybe thousands of gallons, it’s just going to cut through the soil and exposed roots. It’s gonna do a lot of property damage. What we do in this case is we build a dry creek bed for the aesthetic beauty and it serves a purpose. So I want to show you a finished dry creek bed and I want you to know that it was methodically thought through as far as the location, how it meandered. We didn’t try to change the direction of the water. We literally just went with the flow of the water.
I wanted to show you some dry creek beds. I’m in Rochester Hills, Michigan. It lives up to its name. Do you see this four to five-inch cobblestone? These dry creek beds are aesthetically pleasing and if you have swales along the driveway or through your property, and every time it rains, the water cuts through the property, you can’t fight it. There’s, there’s a point to where you just gotta roll with it. In many cases, you can redirect water, but you got to evaluate where the water is doing the least amount of harm. So if it’s just out in the yard, so this dry creek bed just whines right to the culvert here. During really hard rains, the water washes down from the higher elevations and this was methodically done methodically thought through the way the water comes out of the woods. Now, higher elevations, you’re not going to be able to cut the grass. It’s always going to be saturated. So you just form a dry creek bed.
This is a great solution to those wet swales. When you’re moving high volumes of water, this really helps because it slows the water down. When water is running over the stone aggregate and especially large aggregate like this, the velocity slows down. If this stone wasn’t here, then the water would pick up so much velocity, it would erode and cut deep grooves in the terra firma.
All right guys, until the next video.
