What a perfect winter! A little snow for Christmas, gone in a couple of days, and now it feels like one long fall season with soft bare ground and +7C forecast for tomorrow. Very nice for getting outdoor work done.

We are lucky to have a skilled backhoe operator close by to address our erosion woes. After roadbuilding above and behind our rental cottage we have been getting an awful lot more water cascading down the hill after every rain. So much so that it would be a matter of time before the cottage fell into the hole that was growing at an alarming rate. We lined the muddy banks with landscape fabric and I built a kind of sluiceway to direct the water flow out over the eroding edge.

Amazing how he can carefully place those huge boulders with that unwieldly looking bucket.

The 10" plastic culvert was dug out of the driveway (above) and replaced with some scavenged 15" concrete pipe.

Which gave us enough pipe to complete the drainage down to the ditch along the driveway.

Come spring I think planting some low growing bush conifers will disguise the edges of the landscape fabric and make things look more natural.

That's a lotta rock! Now I'm going to go soak my old back...