John Macgregor

No, Australia doesn't have native deciduous trees.

Nonetheless these trees drop some leaf litter. However rain & wind generally move it to the log barriers you can see - it piles up against them.

So I have filled in the spaces quite a bit since these photos were taken.

I have about an acre of gently sloping clay land (southern Australia), which was eaten back to nothing by goats 40 years ago - & nothing has grown since.

Erosion has been happening for a few years, & some gullies now run 100m down to the creek. I filled them with Bill Zeedyk-style weirs & fences, & laid branches & logs across the slope (along the contour), across the expanse of clay. Both have held up fallen leaves & debris, & water, very nicely. I have also been collecting everyone's garden waste from the nearest town, & dumping it all over the clay.

Nine months on, topsoil is forming & things have begun growing in it. It'll probably take 5 years before it's all fixed.

Thanks Krofter - now I know what urbanite is.

It would make a great creek baffle IMO, so I will see if anyone has any around here.

Thanks for the heads-up.

Thanls Krofter.

I can't make your link work. What's urbanite?

I've done it all by hand so far, but am always open to labour-saving.

Thanks Alan.

I've glad you've seen it work. I can't afford 4" pickets (they're about $5 each, & you ned 30 for every baffle) so given that I have a good supply of rocks, gabions sound worth a shot.

Travis's point below, about the steel eventually rusting out, is a good one. But in a creek baffle by the time that had happened the gabion would be buried in silt & sand - i.e. it would have got the creek to create a new bank.

I'm wanting to make a straight creek meander to slow it down. The most popular way seems to be with baffles (deflectors) made of thick pickets driven into the creek bed in the shape of a triangle. However that's about $150 per baffle, so I wondered if triangular-shaped gabions might not be cheaper. (Wire that lasted 5 years would be good enough - say chicken wire - as the creek should have built its own bank around the gabion by then.)

I have collected a few thousand rocks this year for smaller water-slowing/erosion-repairing projects, & it is indeed very hard work.

Tyler Ludens wrote:Here's a photo of the meander away from the power pole, that seems to be working.  I made a rock pile to direct the stream away from the side of the channel and the pole.  You can slightly see the rock pile in this photo:

Thanks Tyler, nice to see.

How much build-up of the stream bed has there been?

Will you extend the baffle so the meander keeps extending out beyond the pole?

Several years on, has anyone got any results from applying the Induced Meandering techniques?

I've got a badly eroded creek 12' deep & 15 metres wide (from gold mining), & am thinking of applying some Zeedyk methods such as picket baffles & rock weirs, to make the creek bend.

Tyler Ludens wrote:They held up fantastically in the flood and I think helped save most of our driveway.  We'll be adding more to them in the coming cold season.  I think they, along with some strategic earthworks, will solve all our flood problems in the next few years - we have a 5 year goal of completing all this work, though it will probably be a good idea to continue to add more material as long as we've physically capable of doing so.

Thanks for that.

What do you think of the idea (voiced up above) that weirs & barriers like this don't last long enough, & that changing the flow of the stream is more lasting?

(NB: I'm presently employing your method.)

How are the brush dams holding 8 months on, Ludi?

I've got a similar creek here in southern Australia, & am using various structures - rocks, wire, shadecloth - to make weirs to prevent the considerable gully erosion we have.

The comment above re such structures not lasting long enough - & the need for meandering - got me thinking.