My wife and i are working on a redesign of our backyard. We started by taking down a tree and installing a slate gravel area with a fire pit. It looks great (in my humble opinion) and all has been well with the gravel area until we got some serious rain. Basically what happened is that i had been working on leveling out a portion of the backyard (in the right side of the picture) and the rain came in and pushed a bunch of the dirt into the gravel area. As you might guess, this has been a real pain to clean up and i am VERY interested in preventing this from happening again. In the spring i was planning on laying down some sod that would go right up against the gravel area so it should not be a problem in the long term. Basically I am looking for anyone who can give me some advice on how to keep this from happening again in the during the winter. My grass in the backyard is bermuda (i think)...does it make sense to go ahead and lay down that sod now? Any advice would be GREATLY APPRECIATED! I can also upload more pictures if it would help. Thanks in advance!!!