How to edge a river bank to protect and shore your garden from erosion

One of the mixed blessings of living in the Netherlands is the large amounts of water. You are never more that than a stone's throw away from a canal or river or ditch, and it's almost inevitable (if you live outside the major towns) that you will end up with water running near your property. In our case, we are bounded on 4 sides by drainage canals that form a small part of a complex drainage system that keeps this below sea-level corner of the Netherlands dry. It brings joy with an ever present procession of wildlife - we have ducks, moorhens, swans. coots, kingfishers and herons all within a few steps outside our door.

However with the constantly moving water, and the annual commitment to dredging out of the canal to ensure silt doesn't build up, erosion is a real and present problem. Around the fields, it's easy to see that the waterways have widened significantly over the years. Around the house, the banks are managed on one side by a line of mature lime trees, who's roots have bound up the soil tightly and act as a natural edging. At the front however, you can see the remnants of the old 'beschoeing' or river edging with a few rotten spikes intermittently sticking up about a foot or more away from the bank. When W had to mess around in the water to put the new gates in, he found out the hard way that whilst the main canal is shoulder deep, the old edging has slowed erosion sufficiently that there is an underwater bank that is only knee high deep. Sadly we weren't quick enough with a camera to capture the experience - and with forewarning, no-one else seems sold on the idea of recreating it.

We decided that we wanted to replace the front edging for two reasons - one, to stop the erosion and stabilize the banks and secondly to limit the amount of damage the resident muskrats are doing to our front lawn. Muskrats are avid tunnelers and leave as comprehensive a set of networks as your average mole - but significantly larger in diameter. These regularly collapse, scenting the air with a tempting aroma that no self respecting Great Dane can ignore - triggering some mad digging by one of the most efficient canine-destruction machines you've ever seen : a GD puppy on the hunt!

Lots of research later we decided that doing it the old fashioned way - by hand - would be the way to go and that we felt confident to do it ourselves with lots of help from the lads. We followed plans from http://www.bakkerdehouthandel.nl/ and had all of the materials delivered from them. (All credit for the graphics are bakkerdehouthandel and we recommend getting materials from them - they have an easy onsite calculator to work out exactly how much you need!).

The process consists of sinking poles into the basal mud layer. Each pole needs to be 2/3rd sunk, and 1/3 boarding to shore up the edging. The gap between each pole is a maximum of 50 cms apart as illustrated in this diagram



You then attach boards horizontally along the poles to provide at least one board height above the waterlevel and boards all the way down through the water to the base level of the river. The boards go on the inside of the poles so that the soil pressure pushes them against the supports.

The boards are attached using bolts to the main poles and a horizontal bracing bar is applied on the outside ( waterside) of the poles to prevent warping and to give additional support for the land anchors.



Finally you attach anchors into the soil to ensure that the boards & poles have support and don't slide outwards over time. You add a layer of plastic to stop the soil from filtering through the cracks on the inside (land) of the boarding, and you back fill the gap between where you are boarding and where your bank actually is with large amounts of soil. Let it settle, stomp it down, repeat the filling until the ground reaches the level you want. Finally top off the poles with a flat board to give you a more presentable front and an edge to sit on.




Looks easy, doesn't it? So....no issues, right? Well here's how it *really* went!

The first task was to measure up and plan how much wood and boarding we would need, Whilst nominally this isn't a terribly hard task, given the clear instructions from deBakker, it's surprisingly hard to measure in a straight line, and to balance on a narrow muddy edge when there is a Great Dane  who thinks that the sole reason you are in the canal is to play ball with him. Luca spent most of the afternoon pointedly dropping his ball in the canal and nudging it away into the middle of the canal whilst staring pointedly at poor W - who was freezing, grouchy and not happy with his childhood flashbacks of retrieving balls from water!

Once the wood order and the crew had assembled the next challenge was how to assemble and put together the frame. W & team quickly decided after advice from our neighbor F that the way to go was to assemble lots of individual panels on dry land, to attach the large flat boards on to the main poles and to sink each panel as a block into the muddy base. They then chose to attach the reinforcing strip once the panels were in place and to do the same with the mud guard plastic and the anchors.

The first panel made it quite clear just how TOUGH a good hardwood is - and you definitely don't want to be using softwoods underwater. Within the first 3 hours, we had burnt out 3 drill bits and burned out the motor on a deWalt rechargeable drill. Knots and just the sheer number of holes needed made this an incredibly tough activity. Note to the wise : you want to drill slowly and steadily, not at max power, and take time to clear the drill bit of sawdust regularly.
Eventually the team got into a good steady rhythm that allowed consistent progress, without destroying machines & tools. All the movable woodworking tables that W has made over the last few months came into their own and we were able to use them outside in the sunshine to get maximum throughput Here's the assembly line in progress!

With the first panel done, the team decided to try placing it immediately to work out what the challenges were ahead. The dream team grabbed the first panel- with all of their proposed boards attached to it and headed out to the water to start sinking it into the riverbed. They very quickly realized that a) its remarkably hard to hammer 5 poles in simultaneously  and b) when you screw up on the location, and have to move it sideways, it's REALLY hard to pull it back out of the mud to re-position it! We learned a valuable lesson early on : be willing to improvise a little on measurement - sometimes although the letter of the law calls for 5 boards, reality of the river bank only allows 4! We also learned that the action of hammering the poles caused the tops to split and crack quite a lot. Luckily we had purchased extra long poles, so by moving the board placement further down, we gave ourselves a much longer level of pole at the top, that we could cut off later on with a reciprocating saw. Easier to hammer, and less traumatic when you splinter off chunks!

After first day creating panels, it was back to the task of placing them in the river on the second day. Unfortunately the remnants of the old 'beschoeiing' rapidly proved to be a problem, with the old collapsed frame getting in the way of the new poles. Electric tools and water don't really mix very well, so we had to revert to good old fashion hand tools and my trusty bow saw for tree surgery got called into action. Luckily the weather was on our side with glorious hot & sunny days making up for the fact that water was glacially cold and very very very murky! Each footstep through the mud released methane from the decaying plant materials making the whole exercise particularly fragrant!

At the end of the third day we'd completed fitting the right hand side of the bank and discovered some of the challenges we had created for ourselves with sinking the gate posts into the water. It wasn't too much of a problem to the right of the gate as it was not far overhung, but on the left we had to do a long diagonal slice around the fencing and come up with new creative ideas to stop Luca from traversing out to freedom.

 The dream team also came up with interesting ideas on how to balance out across the water, in order to keep momentum and power behind their sledgehammer strokes when the bank and boarding had significantly parted company. It gave us inspiration for a later innovation : the cat scramble board or duck boards - to help animals which don't want to remain in the water to get safely out. As both Lumikki and Jesper had fallen into the canals within days of being allowed out to roam, I want to be sure that the wooden edging doesn't have fatal results when one of them misjudges their steps.

Once all the boards were in, it was time to attach the plastic material that stops the soil from trickling away. This is done on the inside, along the line of the main retaining baton. Once attached,the main retaining strip put in,and the ground anchors attached, it was time to start to long hard graft of back-filling the soil gap. Luca had decided early on that it was HIS fort, and that he was the king of the castle! It gave him a perfect location to supervise the work that everyone was doing and to provide his own personal commentary to the proceedings!

Once back-filled, we took a few days off to let the soil settle, and to find out if we'd missed any sneaky corners where the soil was trickling away. This seems to be an inevitable part of the process, and we were lucky to only have one 'leak'. Once settled it was top up time then we needed to remove the top extension of the pole down at the board height and to attach the flat board over the top to finish it off. Whilst initially the boarding looks really 'wonky' - wavering all over the place with no real straight lines in place - once the retaining bar and the top was laid on, it was amazing how much the movement disappeared. From the far side of the river, it looks beautiful and smooth with a gentle curve that mirrors the shape of the land.

5 days of hard work later (plus a few waiting days ) and we ended up with a beautiful new canal edge. The observant among you will have spotted the extra special add on that we made -  I'll talk more about in a later post - a fishing boardwalk!

The battle of the weeds continues

It's definitely spring and heading fast into summer. The weather has been glorious - sunny balmy weather with sprinkles of rain just often enough to put every growing thing into overdrive. As a result, the crabgrass, nettles, ivy and other weeds are all relentlessly advancing across the garden. The last few days has been a pretty solid fight, armed with handfork, trowel and large amounts of bark chipping to get the majority of the main areas under control. We've weeded, turned soil and laid out over 5 cubic metres of bark chips - and planted lots of new plants.

As weeding is not the most photographic activity, I haven't really blogged much about it. But here are a few pictures of the end result. I'm hoping that in a few weeks, after a bit more of this, I will have an extra special end result and have lost a few pounds! It's certainly looking pretty good on W - I think I need to do some catching up with him on the heavy lifting.

I'm also really looking forwards to the middle of the summer when all the little pots planted will be much larger and have jumped on the springtime explosion-wagon.

The other joy of spring is all the fruit trees bursting into flower - we have a wonderful display on the main pear tree which is a lovely sight of an evening. All the trees in the orchard have survived the winter flooding - we worried for a while that we'd lost a couple due to having their roots in water for too long when the field drain blocked and flooded the fields. The flowers are coming out in their own pattern - the cherries have bloomed first, and the apples are following along closely.

The crab apples are gorgeous - I'm counting on them to bring us our first crop of fruit this summer as they are excellent pollinators for all our apple varieties. Roll on the summer!

Making a workbench for a mitre saw

This winter has definitely been laying the groundwork for the heavy lifting we will need to do next year when we take on the new levels in the house. Tools have been at the heart of everything - whether they are garden tools or woodworking and DIY tools. W has spent hours poring over reviews on the interweb before deciding on each and every purchase. The tools aren't enough, though - you really need work benchs for tools to be able to work at their optimum level.

As a result, W has been busy making up a workbench to run the mitre (or miter, if you are american!) saw on. We've had it sat on an old tumble dryer as a stop gap, but it's not really safe and secure, so getting it onto a long term home was quite important.

For doing a lot of this sort of foundational work, W has been using a cheap and cheerful white deal plank that we buy in bulk from our favourite wood merchant. The first task was to work out the measurements - we used an online design as the base pattern , but needed to adjust the height to fit the specifics of the Makita mitre saw that we have, and wanted to make it 4 meters 40 cm  wide, and 60 cm  deep to accommodate European wood sizes. Once that was done, it was chopping time - cutting all the required lengths of planking to size. Then on to using a kreg jig to make the recessed screw holes to fit the 90 degree joins together.

Once everything was ready to assemble, time to get busy with the wood glue and screws. W has made a template to make sure that the corners are at 90 degrees true when being screwed together and you can see it in use here, with clamps holding it in place.

Once the main frame was assembled it's time to move onto the top surfaces. You can see that the sides are both higher than the central dipped area : the dip is where the mitre saw sits as it's got quite a high base. This means that you can support long planks on both sides of the workbench  on the flat surfaceand not have to juggle madly whilst cutting. Definitely a safety advantage! The main surface is a cheap composite board, that can be easily replaced if it gets damaged.

Last but not least, to make sure that we can move the workbench reasonably easily, W added roller wheels at the base. It looks gorgeous and hopefully it's going to be worth it's weight in gold soon!

Raised garden beds for vegetables

To go with our gorgeous and hopefully very fruity orchard, we want to be able to grow our own vegetables and greens. I love organic vegetables but here in the Netherlands the selection is tiny, and in our more isolated neck of the woods, it's often pretty tired looking. So, I've opted to grow my own again - and believe me, fresh off the stem veg are WONDERFUL!

We spent a lot of time thinking about where to put our vegetable garden,There is a lot of space that has no plan yet, but I am still playing with lots of ideas and I didn't want to block off any potential options.  W finally pointed out that we have two large areas  that have no particular use in the foreseeable future - the riding ring and the starvation paddock. We don't want to remove them, as they are part of the value of the house as a horse property, but we don't have horses. Just perfect for raised beds, with a good sand base to make sure the drainage is good and lots of sunshine.

We did a lot of research on different ways of making raised beds. I was particularly looking at how to limit the need for watering in the middle of summer - I don't mind doing it once or twice a week, but I know from past experience that I don't have the will power to water every day. Two different types appealed : one is based off 'hugelkultur'  and one that had a water retention base layer. So, with lots of space to play in, we decided to try both!

 A hugelkultur based raised bed has a core of natural materials that absorb water and decay over time providing a continuous flow of nutrients into the soil. You can make the raised bed by heaping soil over a long pile of branches and sticks or over straw bales, but as we have lots of branches and twigs in a giant heap in the garden (the last owner really wasn't a gardener type) wood was going to be our base. With W's passion for wood working, the beds were going to be made in wood, and as I'm not getting any younger, I wanted them to be tall enough that I didn't have to do all of the maintenance on my knees. W chose a white deal plank which hasn't had any chemical treatment. We both realized it means we will need to redo them again in about 5 years, but I don't want any preservative chemicals leaching into the soil. Each bed is 240 cm by 120 cm and is made 3 planks in height. His first task was to cut and prepare all the planks to the same size, something that the Makita mitre saw made quick work of. He also used a kreg jig to pre-drill holes for screw in the end planks, two per plank edge. The long planks had a square piece of wood attached into the inner corners as strengthening, indented just enough to make room for the cross planks to run across the front. ,

With all the preparation complete, it was time to move out of the workshop and start doing assembly in the starvation paddock.The sand is pretty uneven, so the assembly was pretty difficult - we quickly decided to move back to the concrete to find a flat surface to work on. In this picture you can see the placement of the crossbracing corner piece., Each of the short planks on the rectangle are screwed in to the long planks on the interior diagonal courtesy of the kreg jig. It is then double secured with two screws from the outside into the cross bracing post. Rinse & repeat until all four corners are complete and you have a wooden rectangle without top or bottom.

We then used a weed control membrane to line the bottom of the box and tacked it into the box using a staple gun. I decided to go with a porous fabric rather than a waterproof liner, as I have learned the hard way just how much water the Dutch weather throws at us here. In a drier climate, I suggest you use a waterproof base, but make sure you pierce it below the root level. Capillary action will keep the upper layers of soil moist enough, but a few punctures will make sure you don't saturate the soil to the point that roots rot.  We lipped the membrane quite high up the side of the box, mainly because that was the width of the membrane, and I decided it wouldn't hurt to leave it like that.

Once the frame and membrane was complete it was time to fill the lower layers with branches and rotting wood. This was probably the most exhausting part of the day! Not because it was hard to collect and fill with the wood, but because every branch is perfectly designed as a dog chew - and Luca wanted to play - continuously!

One afternoon of focused work and the first three beds are assembled, lined and have their wood filling. We need to get soil delivered, spend another afternoon with a wheel barrow and spades doing the final filling - and then it's planting time! Tomorrow it's time to do the other beds and those will be with a water retention base style. For the rest of today, it's time for a hot shower and a relaxing drink whilst watching the sun go down in blazing colors.

Renovating the Mudroom : build phase 1

When we first stepped into this house, our first impression of the house's interior was the mudroom. It was a dark and scruffy room.   and smelled faintly of damp. The walls had random pipes and industrial style ventilation tubing which crisscrossed over the whole room. The only light came from a tiny side window and the glass upper door. We knew this room needed to be radically changed - but I don't think we realised just how much we would need to do to make it a beautiful room.


There was a strange velvet flocked brick pattern wallpaper which was peeling away - and appeared to be held onto the walls by dint of many tin-tacks in the corners of kid's paintings that were pinned to the walls. One side of the room was lined with old kitchen cabinets for storage of paints and random stuff . This was the third kitchen in the house - definitely well equipped on the kitchen front! On the opposite side of the room, an old doorway had been partially bricked up, but poorly done so that it was only flat on the other side, leaving a strange dip in the wall in the room.

Wall paper stripping can be quite soul destroying - but I always find it interesting to see the history of the house emerge - different paper layers, and different colors of paint, as you strip away the paper. It's almost a consolation for the hours you have to spend steaming and stripping stubborn patches of wallpaper, in order to prepare for your new colors. At some point in time, some previous owners had a love for candy pink walls with a dark burgundy lower trim in a hard gloss. It makes a dark and small room even smaller and darker - and definitely doesn't match the yellow and green wooden trim of the doors! At least the gloss paint helped with the removal of the wallpaper, but on the pink surfaces it was so thoroughly glued that we had to scrape inch by inch.

Preparation continued on all sides - we also ripped out the old kitchen units, and then started to knock out the shape of a new window next to the entrance door. The plan was to build a window frame and insert a double glazed window pane into the double barn doors that form the front of the room. Nothing ever goes smoothly though - and as we started to cut, we quickly realized that the wall/barn doors had not been properly secured as it started to collapse. IDD to the rescue : he had the team quickly refocused on replacing and re-pinning structural framework and supporting the floor above. Once it was all repaired, we could continue with our window work  and replacing and increasing the insulation in the wall. As the hole emerged it made the most amazing difference to the light in the room - definitely one of the best decisions we could have made!

Once we'd stripped all the paper and  all the preparation work was complete, it was clear that the walls were too damaged to redecorate without re-skinning with plaster - and D is a plaster guru. He corralled a team and the lads started to re-plaster the whole room. This last summer was gloriously warm and sunny  : both a blessing and a curse when you are doing so much work. Hard for the workers as it's hot, heavy, hard work, but good for drying out the plaster. That's a double edged sword as it dries so fast it's hard to finish smoothly, but D took it in his stride. A few tips we learned as we went along : if you are mixing a lot of plaster, having a mixing paddle with a power motor is a must. There are lots of different grades of plaster and they are not completely interchangeable. We also used a metal corner brace to shape the corners of the room - it's lovely for a while, but a Great Dane can knock the thin plaster layer off in seconds!

Plastering done, we started the clean up - and discovered that plaster gets EVERYWHERE. It's really nasty stuff for spreading all over the house, and we learned the hard way that you can't just hoover it up. It's so fine that it goes straight through all the filters you have on your hoover, unless it's an industrial grade builders hoover , coats the engine and the electrics, and burns it out. We were not planning on replacing our Dyson hoover, but after it died halfway through the build , we had to! The tiles on the floor are quite old, uneven and full of nooks and crannies that the plaster can hide in  - mopping just seemed to push the plaster around. At some point in the future I plan to replace them and to level the floor which is incredibly wobbly and uneven, but not just yet, so we had to get them clean. We hired a circular sanding machine  with a bristle brush attachment and used that to break through the majority of the plaster dust, but in the end, nothing beats getting down on hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and good old elbow grease!


After so much work just to reach blank canvas stage, painting seemed quick and easy - although incredibly expensive in paint. The fresh plaster drank the paint like a desert drinks rain - and we had to do multiple coats to get the color even and streak-free. I have always like coastal themed homes and this Design seed inspiration picture set the tone for the direction I wanted the room to have. I didn't find an exact match - but I chose a white with a hint of blue - and a light blue accent wall for this room.  The woodwork was all repainted in a light neutral shade that complimented the wall colour.

I had spent quite a lot of time on Pinterest in the run-up to the work session, and had a good idea of the type of furniture I wanted in the room - and this picture gives the closest idea of what I wanted to achieve.I want to be able hide away the jumble of daily life that collects in your entrance way in deep cupboards - and still to be able to hang coats, scarves and dog leads in a convenient and easy location. With so much land, it's also essential to be able to remove boots and muddy shoes quickly, before continuing into the rest of the house. It's called  a mudroom for a reason. It was also going to be the room where Luca slept and stayed when the house is empty. Of course, like all best laid plans, I'm a complete softie, and Luca gets to go where ever he wants, whenever he wants! With the inspiration images to hand, IDD & D spent a couple of evenings drawing out plans and designing what we could best fit into the space.

Once the plaster was dry, IDD got to work gluing and cutting a lovely pine board to build the basic frame of the furniture. I intend to whitewash the pine to give it a hint of white - but as we haven't yet completed the doors and the trim, it's still on the to-do list. Roll on Phase 2! We ended up with a shelved cupboard and two deep wardrobes for coats and winter clothes. We have a comfy seat along one wall that you can sit on whilst you change shoes, backed  with a set of high open hooks for wet coats and accessories to dry on, before being put away in the cupboard.

Like all the best plans, we ran out of time before we managed to get the doors fitted and W has been fully occupied on so many other things that we still have an open set up in the mudroom. I can't wait to get the doors and trim done, so that I can paint and finish the room, but I think I will need to be patient until it's warm enough to work outdoors again. There's a lot of gluing and cutting to be done to achieve it and the stable block where we do most of our DIY work set up has no heating. It's still a lot better than it was  and like every entrance, is full of miscellaneous items that mysteriously migrate there when you are not locking. We even have a small dog table for Luca to drink his water from - as a Great Dane, he is prone to bloat, and needs to have his food and water elevated to a comfortable height.