How to Slow and Heal Soil Erosion
Soil erosion is a natural process in nature, but natural disasters, human error, pests, and a hundred other things can cause it to become out of control. Sometimes it can’t be avoided, but we can slow it down and heal soil erosion in our yards. If you do this, you can keep your lawn healthy and green for years to come. We can explain the ways you can slow and heal soil erosion.
How to Slow Soil Erosion
How you can slow soil erosion depends on the type your lawn is experiencing. There are six types of erosion that work by first breaking apart your soil, moving it away from where it should be, and depositing it somewhere it doesn’t help anyone or anything. These can be caused by rain, floods, and wind.
If you live in a place that’s typically stricken by drought, you might not worry about erosion types caused by rain or floods. You want to be aware of your local weather because, in Arizona, there are many places prone to flooding.
Creating Barriers
By barriers, we don’t mean tall fences or large mounds. Small decorative rocks do the trick. Use them to surround the areas that are deceptive to sheet and wind erosion. The rocks will block the wind from hitting most of the soil because despite how small the rocks can be, the fragments of the soil are even smaller.
The decorative rocks can also be positioned to improve drainage. They create a path that water is supposed to follow after rainfall. This keeps the water from seeping into the soil, drowning it, and/or worse, overflowing and carrying the soil’s nutrients away.
Till Your Lawn
Tilling is where you turn over and break up your soil. If there’s been a hard rainfall, a flood, or worse, tilling your lawn will help to keep it from compacting or de-compact it if need be. Don’t till your lawn before a rainfall, or if the rainfall wasn’t harsh. Tilling your lawn before you need to can kill the organisms like worms that aerate it.
Tilling your lawn is meant to stop rill erosion which sets in after a big rainfall. So, unless you’re also mixing something into the soil, tilling is not a proactive way of preventing soil erosion.
Adding Shrubbery and Keeping Trees
Tall plants really do it all. They catch water, drastically reducing how much hits the ground, and they act as protection against the wind. This reduces just about every type of erosion. When it comes to floodplain erosion, shrubbery can provide a bit of defense against minimal flooding, and how much protection a tree offers depends on its size. If you’re considering planting shrubs or cutting down trees in your yard, consider how they slow soil erosion.
How to Heal Soil Erosion
We can do everything we can and still see the signs of soil erosion in our yards. Don’t give up, because depending on the type of soil erosion, your yard won’t just die, but could slowly become a hazard. If you start working to heal soil erosion soon after it sets in, you can avoid a serious problem and keep your lawn in good shape.
Improve Soil Drainage
When it comes to soil erosion caused by water, it won’t stop on its own because the extra water has still seeped into your lawn. You typically want to provide a top layer to your lawn that filters out extra water. You can do this with products such as compost, amendment, and mulch. You want to use organic types for each to keep nutrients for your soil and drain away excess water.
Plant Salt-tolerant Plants
If you’ve let the soil erosion get out of control, your lawn can become over-encumbered with salts. When this happens, you need to do your best to wash the salt away with clean water and plant plants that will accumulate salt. While drowning a lawn can lead to more soil erosion, if it's already to the point of high salinity, the erosion the salt will cause is worse than the erosion water will cause.
After trying to wash out as much of the salt as you can, planting salt-tolerant plants, such as halophytes, will work to leech out salt, reduce salinity, and help you get your lawn on the right track, healing soil erosion.
Contact Us for Help Slowing and Healing Soil Erosion
If you’re unsure about how to get your lawn back to a healthy place, the experts at Pioneer Landscape Centers can help. We have years of expertise dealing with common problems like soil erosion and can provide you with the materials, guidance, and/or directions so you can get everything you need to slow and heal things like soil erosion. Contact us today for help.