When I made my first trip to Floyd County in 2007, I already knew that there was a company that made yurts, Blue Ridge Yurts, but didn’t have the opportunity to actually go inside one until later that year. Then, in 2008, one of the principals of the yurt company took me on a tour that included two yurt homes. I was enchanted with the space but not thrilled with the rather, ummmmm, impermanent materials used. Of course, yurts are designed to be portable – the idea of a permanent yurt is an oxymoron, but I still loved the space inside them. I investigated more permanent yurts, called frame panel yurts, but ultimately decided against them also. But I kept the idea of a circle, a conical roof, and a skylight at the top of the cone to flood the interior with light.

Enter a company in Floyd named AuzBloc, which manufactures a building material called Builderscrete. It is made of a proprietary mix of clay soil, portland cement, and sawdust. The material was invented in Australia and the company there is known as Timbercrete, but that name was already taken in the United States by a fence company, so the same material in this country is called Builderscrete. I sat down with the principle of the Floyd franchise, Bill McGuire, this last visit and had a nice long chat with him. He answered all of my questions and convinced me that this is the material of my dreams. I talked to him about a round house and he was willing to design a block with an arch to accommodate my dreams but I came to the (temporary!) conclusion that maybe it would be better to settle for a 12-sided structure, called a dodecagon. After doing some further calculations, it became clear to me that a round house, 36′ in diameter, would not be hard to build with rectangular blocks after all. So a two-story round house it will be! With a central “core” that includes the bathroom, kitchen, and a masonry heater to furnish hot water for the radiant floor. And a green metal roof, suitable for rain catchment, with a skylight at the top to let in light.

This house is from the Timbercrete website, to show you what the material looks like:

Hmmmm …. those black locust logs, milled on three sides so that the unmilled twisted grain side faces out would make wonderful lintels, wouldn’t they? And if the blocks were of different colors, that would be cool, too wouldn’t it?

There are presently four houses under construction using Builderscrete in Floyd County and a friend of mine told me where one was, so I went and looked at it from a distance. Very nice. It was small, cozy, and very visually appealing.

This is still very much a work in progress, and will likely change further, but I think I have the broad outlines in place. When will construction start? Hmmmmm …. depends on lots of variables, but I hope to have it at least dried in and able to be “camped” in by the fall of 2011. We’ll see ……

Poison ivy (rhus radicans) is a valuable wildlife food, something that I learned some years ago, after cutting most of the poison ivy on my property here in Florida. From the Backyard Nature site:

“Poison ivy is a nuisance to people, but compensates by having considerable wildlife value. The white, waxy berries are a popular food for songbirds during fall migration and in winter when other foods are scarce. Robins, catbirds and grosbeaks especially like the berries. Many birds feed on insects hiding in the tangled vines. Small mammals and deer browse on the poison ivy foliage, twigs and berries.”

For those of you who don’t know what a large poison ivy vine looks like in the woods, here is a picture of a large one climbing a tree on my property:

Not all poison ivy vines look like this one, however. Some do not have as many hairy roots as this one does. So be cautious when wandering in the woods – don’t brush up against plants that you can’t positively identify.

Here is a picture of the business portion of the plant, taken by James H. Miller:

I wore a long-sleeve shirt, a long-sleeve flannel shirt on top of that and leather gloves and I was able to get in close to many large rose plants and cut the stems at ground level. I noticed that since the last time I did this, the deer had browsed the new green shoots. For once, I was happy to have deer on the property! They are so numerous in Floyd County that they are very much “rats on stilts”, as a friend once called them. But in this case, I’ll take any help that I can find! Once the plants are dead, they disintegrate quickly. Controlling multiflora rose is no easy task, though, because new plants spring up from the roots as far away as 50′ from the mother plant. The plant thrives in sunlight, so the fact that I have opened up the forest is going to create problems for me. But one step at a time. Fortunately, multiflora rose does not grow that rapidly.

I brought along a pair of Felco 23 loppers and a Felco 610 pruning saw and cut, over a period of 5 days, about 1,000 vines. Some of the vines were 3.5″ in diameter and had to be sawn. I had numerous instances where I found a tangle of vines such as is shown in this picture. The picture below shows a very small vine that I missed at first but cut on my last morning in Floyd.

You can see it twining around another vine on the tree in the foreground – it is only about .75″ in diameter, but given time, would grow much bigger. I gave no quarter to my enemy – I cut it and yanked it out by the roots, something that I didn’t do for 99% of the rest of the vines. To do so would have meant weeks of labor. I am satisfied that, if nothing else, I have set the oriental bittersweet back a good ways – it will take several years to make its presence known in a big way and by then, I’ll be living on the property and will be able to aggressively deal with it. In the meantime, the trees will have been given a reprieve from the smothering vines and will be able to flourish for the first time in many years.

It isn’t easy to see in this picture, but there are three blue paint marks on the large oak on the right side of the picture. That was for the benefit of a logger who, after the marks were made, decided that there wasn’t enough marketable timber on the property to make it worth his while. That has turned out to be a blessing, because I rather like some of those twisted and unusually shaped trees!

Here is pretty much the same route, taken last week:

The fallen leaves are such a pretty carpet, aren’t they? If you didn’t know better, you’d never know that a machine had made this path, would you? The path made for a very nice stroll through the woods – no downed trees in the way to trip over and no thickets of multiflora rose to steer clear of.