I recently finished building a dry creek bed in my backyard, and it's solved a drainage problem that we've had for years. Our house is on the side of a hill, and the water flows around the back of the house during heavy rains, washing away mulch and soil.

I decided to correct the problem when we replaced our old deck with a screen porch earlier this summer. The builders trampled all of my landscaping around the deck, so it was the perfect time to redo the area. I started out digging a shallow, winding trench around the porch and mounded the soil between the trench and the porch. The ground slopes downward toward the trench on the other side, so I didn't have to do anything on that side. I then lined the trench with weed barrier and randomly placed some larger rocks along the edges of the "creek bed." Finished it up with nearly 2 tons of river rocks, which was enough to fill the 50' long trench with some rocks left over for smaller projects around the yard.

I finished the new landscape with a selection of ferns, ornamental grasses and groundcovers in the surrounding beds. We've had several torrential rains since I completed the project, with nothing washing out, so the dry creek bed did the trick.

Here is a link that might be useful: dry creek bed

This post was edited by dawgie on Tue, Aug 5, 14 at 14:35