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We did finally get the basement dug out. But WOW! I had forgotten how much compacted subsoil expands when it is dug out of the ground and loaded onto a dump truck. Ryan Shortt, the operator of the excavator, figured it was about 200 dump truck loads! And all of it was shale mixed with subsoil that wouldn’t grow kudzu even if you fertilized it. What to do?
We used about 100 dumptrucks in an upper field to fill a ravine. We scraped all the topsoil away first, filled the ravine, covered it back over, and replanted. About 30 were set aside for backfilling the basement after it is finished, and the rest spread over a future roadbed. I never figured I would have to figure out how to hide 200 dump truck loads of subsoil. I’m sure I’m not through dealing with it.
The footers for the basement walls did get dug and poured as well as all the plumbing drains and drain field for the basement. The forms for the basement walls were delivered yesterday. I’m told it will take less than a week for the entire basement to be formed and poured. So this time next week maybe we’ll have a basement?
Footers
It’s been a great hay-growing year. We’ve had more rain this spring than any in the past 5 years or so. And then we had one blessed week break about a month ago where a lot of folks were able to get up their hay. We missed that window, but were able to get ours up in small stages in between the rains.
Making Hay
In the end we got about 150 round bales. Not too bad, but too bad everyone got a lot of hay this year, and the price for hay is severely depressed.
About 10 years ago I bought 15 acres of land in the local big city of Christiansburg that was advertised with a restorable log cabin, and auctioned by a friend of mine. Local elder folks, as they always will, said it was one of the oldest cabins in the area. Could be true, but my best guess is that it is only about 100 years old based on land records. It was initially built as what is called a “dog-trot”, two individual cabins, or “cribs” of about 14′x14′ each, separated by a breezeway of about 6′. Each crib was 1 1/2 stories tall, with the sleeping lofts up above, and the whole thing would have been covered by one continuous roof. Sometime later, my guess is in the 1930’s or 1940’s, the breezeway was enclosed, with a front door added, the second floor was raised to full height, and stairs were added in the old breezeway. At some point, a front addition was built to create a kitchen and bathroom (or likely the porch enclosed), and then another to create an entrance utility room (or likely the new porch enclosed). That’s how it was done in those days. There were limited mortgages – you just built as you had money. The same is true in Nevis where we live in the winter. When the locals have money they buy cinderblock, when they have time, they lay cinderblock. Come to think of it, that’s how I built my current house in Floyd. But I digress. Back to the log cabin.
On first inspection, the logs seem to be mostly oak, with a little poplar. The outside corners of the logs are flush, which would seem to be so to accommodate siding, as was often the case at the time of construction of higher end log homes. But the present hardboard siding and the original construction of the cabin seem to indicate that the siding was a later addition or probable replacement.
About 10 years ago, my current general contractor, Sticks and Stones Construction, gutted it so I could better see. Due to the poorly done front addition, water had been leaking down the front logs for who knows how many years, and the logs were soaked through and through. It obviously wasn’t restorable in its current state. I let it sit while I decided what to do with it. In the meantime, vandals have been entering, and almost burned it down over the past winter. Time to do something.
Enter a good old buddy, Al Anderson. Al and I built swimming pools together for the same company in our youth, although we don’t remember each other. We hooked up again about 30 years ago, and although we only see each other a few times a year, we’ve remained good friends. Al restarted the timber-frame industry here about 25 years ago, founding BlueRidge Timberworks (with Steve Arthur now a partner in StreamLine, our architects and timberframe company), from which all timberframe companies around here must claim heritage. Al has been on the Board of the the Timberframers Guild for the past five years. But his company, TimberWorks of Interest, has turned its attention to log cabins and barn restorations lately, and he wanted to see what he could do to save this one.
He and I agreed it won’t be able to be restored as is – it’s been too cut up, rotted, and adulterated. But my idea, and Al agreed, was to “repurpose” it to be another equipment shed at CRF. Adaptive reuse is what I think it’s called in the urban planning biz. Take it apart, and put it back together with the good logs and see what we end up with is about the ugly truth. But we’ll do it with as much sensitivity to what remains as we can to preserve what’s there. And all the rafters, purlins, and other side lumber will be cut on the farm using techniques not that far different than what was originally used. It’s the best we could do to preserve it given the circumstances.
With the help of another good old buddy Jim Callahan and his company, Highland TimberFrame (more on them later), they tore into it this week to disassemble it.
Christiansburg Cabin
The good news is everything has come apart very easily. The bad news is it’s in worse shape than we thought.
We’ve spent countless hours over the past few months working out all the details of the conservation easement. We’ll be restricting forever anyone building above a certain elevation to protect the scenic knobs that can be seen for miles around, restricting cutting of the big old trees to the environmental practices we’ve already established, rolling in the 3 acre parcel with the homeplace that we later bought, and limiting further division of the property to one division in perpetuity.
That is, if Floyd County lets us. These kinds of easements, while not extensive in Floyd, have been routine. Until now. After viewing our easment and a couple others in what had previously been a routine review, the Planning Commission had the County attorney notify the Virginia Outdoors Foundation that henceforth they will be reviewing all proposed easements to ensure that they adhere to their comprehensive plan.
Seems they now view our County comprehensive plan as only allowing for easements to preserve agricultural land, and they didn’t view our easement as doing so! Sounds to me like they’ve just decided they don’t like conservation easements any more. I’ve seen doctors, lawyers, and the like who depend on a *population* for their business to be against easements, but the first time I’ve seen a public body. Studies have shown that a farm uses far less than it pays in taxes in public services, and a subdivision much more. And Floyd is the fastest growing county in SW VA because of it’s unique beauty and “sense of place”. We’re “defecating in our own nest” if we allow unbridled subdivision to continue.
All is not lost – it appears the Planning Commission will reconsider our easement at their next meeting, and I feel confident that the commission will understand that our easement is very much agriculturally oriented. But I fear that they are too narrowly interpreting the comprehensive plan and will impede other, less agriculturally-oriented easements. And to be fair, serving on the Planning Commission is a totally thankless job, and the issues *are* complex. Seeing the problems, good at thankless jobs, and a sucker for “potential” I might just ask if there is an open position on the Commission.
Hah! As if they would want somebody like me stirring up trouble…
Last fall, we put down 260 tons of lime on the farm to get the pH up from about 5.5 closer to 7. This is the first step towards growing grass – soil nutrients just aren’t available to the plants below 6 or so. Luckily, lime is a good organic solution, with no negative environmental negatives to it’s application to the land other than the energy costs of its extraction and application (which are still significant).
The next key aspect to growing good grass is keeping a good balance of N-P-K, that is nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. They are each limiting – if one is low, it keeps the availability of the others low as well. Measuring Nitrogen is a fleeting and imprecise thing – the standard soil tests don’t even measure it anymore, but it’s easy to assume that it’s very low at CRF. Generally speaking, Floyd soils are rich in potassium, low in phosphorous, and my soil samples tested last fall confirmed that. But since the nitrogen and phosphorous were low, the potassium is not much available to the plants.
Nitrogen can be supplied simply by planting inoculated clover. Our fine biological woodsmen from Healing Harvest have volunteered to help with this, and have located a seed drill. We’ve got about 130 acres to plant, so it won’t be a trivial task.
Getting the phosphorous up is much trickier. There are only a few organic sources of phosphorous – generally bone meal, greensand and rock phosphate. These cost about $4 per pound of available phosphorous, let’s see I need 100 lbs per acre, times 130 acres, equals……YIKES! You can do this on your garden, but certainly not on hay fields!
Another organic option is manure. I would need about 250 tons of manure. Unfortunately, due to the high cost of fertilizer these days, other farmers around here are spreading any available manure they have on their own fields.
So that leaves chemical fertilizers. Much as I hate to do it, I’ll be spreading some chemical phosphate on the fields shortly. Phosphate is critical to the establishment of new plantings, and fear that my new clover crop just won’t take without it. Clover, besides creating nitrogen, also makes the phosphates that are in the soil more available to the grasses. So I’m hoping this is a one-time application, and moving forward I can just use pure organic management practices to maintain soil fertility.
On our current farm, Snipe Hill Farm, we applied phosphate *once* several years ago and it made a huge difference in the quality of the pasture, which it has maintained ever since. Our friend and neighbor (and soil scientist) Jeff Walker convinced me to do this “to get a good stand established”. So far seems to have worked.
Trish and I got back to the farm a week or two ago after spending most of the winter in Nevis. We got back a bit early weatherwise, but I was hoping to get some fields cleared and planted for spring. Unfortunately, it’s been too cold and wet to work the ground much of the time we’ve been back!
Our fine biological woodmen worked when they could this winter, doing timberstand improvement in parts of the woods – thinning bull-pine thickets, and mostly finishing the clearing work all around the house. We had three burn piles near the house going most of the summer and fall which produced a huge amount of ash that I’ve now spread over the field, as well as all the sawdust from the milling operations. There’s still a large amount of woody debris spread across the field that I’m now doing my best to thin using a “root rake” or “landscape rake” so that we can plant it in legumes to build the soil. After all, this “field” was nothing but pure junk when we bought the property – well overgrown with multiflora, ailanthus, rotting locust, and bullpine. It’s been quite a chore to convert this back to pasture.
Root Rake
It’s supposed to rain for the next few days, so that work will have to be put on hold for now. We get such short windows in the spring to work the land – I will not be able to get it all cleared in time to plant spring grass and clover on all of what I wanted, and I shoulda known better. But it’s ok – will do what I can for now, and there are other legumes and grasses that can be planted in the summer and fall. One field at a time.
We haven’t seen much snow in the past couple of years. Natural cycles? Global warming? We don’t know, but we do know that we haven’t gotten much of it recently. But it snowed today at Crooked River, and Bruce, the owner of Sticks and Stones, went out today and snapped some pics.
Timberframe in the snow
Below, Bruce is revelling in his domain. While we’re building the house and garages, it’s *his* domain. At some indeterminate point in the future, we’ll wrest the keys from his hand and it will become our domain again.
Bruce
The river was previously frozen, but now it simply looks pretty all dressed in snow.
River and snow
It’s been relatively warm the past week, thawing the ground and allowing the mud to drain and dry out. So we were all able to get back to work today.
A main activity was getting the road built all the way up to the house site. Shortt’s Excavating has been doing road work for me for about 30 years. When I first moved to Floyd, everybody in the neighborhood said McCray Shortt was the man, so I hired him to redo the driveway, which had been built way wrong. Lo and behold, I come home from work and to my dismay find some 17 year-old looking kid operating a huge motor-grader looking thing on my drive. Turns out it was McCray’s son, Michael. But despite my dismay, the drive has been fine ever since.
When it was time to build this road, 30 years later, it was Michael I called, as he is now in his fiftees and his dad semi-retired. And lo and behold, I show up the first day, and again there is some 17-year old looking kid operating some big machine tearing up the landscape. Turned out to be Ryan, Michael’s son.
Seems like these guys grow up on bulldozers and must just have roadbuilding in their genes. Three generations of Shortt’s I’ve been working with now. They do a great job, and are fun to work with, too.
In the pic below, McCray and Michael lay out geotextile fabric on the road bed before laying gravel. The bottomland is very soft silty/sandy loam which would just eat gravel – the fabric keeps it from doing so. We also used it on parts of the first half mile of road where we ran into schist that just gets as slick and as sloppy as can be when wet.
Roadbuilding
We were also able to burn more brush piles today as it’s still residually wet. The idea is for the bottomland to be clear by spring so that as soon as the ground is ready to be worked for planting, it can be. Burning these piles is a royal pain, though. Ya set them alight, and only about a quarter burns. Then you manually saw up the remainder, and manually move it around into new burn piles. The pic below shows a 200 foot long burn pile we’ve been working on for over a week.
Burn pile from hell
Late last week, I was using my trusty, rusty, Stihl chain saw to saw up one of the dozer piles of Virginia Pines so it would burn. I love my old chain saw – it was the first quality chainsaw I had bought about 1o years ago, and it has given me yeoman service. Still starts on the first few pulls and does the job. When it got dark, I put the saw into the bucket of the tractor and headed back to it’s usual parking spot. On the way, I passed a brush pile we were burning and saw a log had rolled out. I pushed it back in with the tractor bucket. And unknowingly dropped the chainsaw into the burning pile at the same time and went home. DOH!
R.I.P.
Oh, well. Trish had been agonizing over what to get me for Christmas.
The previously terribly cold weather froze the ground. This week it warmed up and rained. This has caused a huge problem with mud everywhere we’ve tried to work. Wed, I got the skid-steer stuck up to about it’s axles almost immediately upon heading out with the grapple bucket. Other workers were getting their 4WD trucks stuck just trying to get to and from the job site. Michael Shortt, the fellow who built the first 1/2 mile of road, returned to build the other half mile of road all the way to the house site, but just dropped off his equipment and said he would come back when conditions improved.
So we’ve just bagged it as well. It’s still above freezing even at night, so perhaps the ground will thaw enough to let the mud drain. We may just have to pull the sawmill out of the bottomland and up to the big woods and start making mud up there.
Mud before it became MUD!
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