Thanks for your reply, Dee.
Dee James wrote:
What ground cover do you see growing in your area that you like? I love to get ideas for what is prolific because it means it will do well naturally in the area and I don't have to spend a lot of time nursing it. Do you have any you have noticed on Sunday drives? Nothing may come to mind at first, but after you ponder it I am betting it will.
I see lots of stuff I like, but unfortunately I don't know native plants by sight at all. This is part of my problem.
Dee James wrote:
I am thinking you can clean up the driveway and fix the erosion with better water bars. That was my first thought when I saw your pictures was trying to locate the water bars.
If you have the water bars tie in with the new planting of your ground cover you can also divert a lot of nutrients and water into the new planting to help with watering.
Yes, I'm still working on the erosion issue. What the picture doesn't capture is that the driveway is in a valley, with an uphill slope on both sides. So I'm digging a trench by hand through solid rock on the left side, and will run the water over to there. I'm not sure if I'll use water bars, or just continue to try to slope the driveway towards the ditch (this is how it was originally done, before I moved in - although they didn't have a good ditch to the side) The good news is that once I get the runoff over to the ditch I don't have to worry about erosion because it truly is just solid rock. Unfortunately this makes it a lot harder to run the water bars over as irrigation. I really need to just run them into a ditch straight to the creek at the bottom, because when it pours here there is pretty much a river coming down that hill. If I try to get fancy and run the water over to some plants, I'm afraid I'll to wash out a massive area by accident.
If you know better about water bars though, I'm open to your suggestions. I'm not planning to do much with the driveway until the Spring rain season is over.