Ant hills!

OK, not really.  Brent screened (quarter inch) 20 five gallon buckets worth of sand and hauled them up a hill to the platform.  Each bucket he dumped looked like an ant hill.

Sand screening set up (quarter inch).

The Hill.

The "ant hills".

We also collected a lot more rocks on the property and finished filling in our moat, I mean, trench.  We then laid out the heavy duty landscaping fabric (really heavy duty - our friends were generous in sharing  it!).  Where the rubble foundation rises above the level of surrounding ground, we back filled over the top of the fabric with the clay soil and packed it (more still needs to be done).  Where the ground was either even with our foundation level or above it, we will back fill on top of the fabric with larger gravel.  The gravel will be a splash back for the yurt fabric to help protect it and will be of a size that we can easily walk on it if needed.  This is not done yet.

I also worked on screening our soil for the adobe floor. Remember that we separated our B and C horizons, with our C being very clay-ey.  I screened 4 shovels of C to one shovel of B as I went, helping mix it all in.  I used a half inch square screening.  I did 10 shovel fulls to each stint at screening and there were four screen fulls to each wheel barrow and I did 7 loads in the wheel barrow.  That's a lot of dirt.

Coarse adobe layer screening set up.

Screening with half inch, right into wheel barrow.

Resultant "coarse" adobe mix ready to use.

So, we lay down about half an inch of sand on our yurt site.  We are laying the sand over a fairly fine kind of gravel anyway, so we aren't worried about perforating the plastic layer (6 mil) that comes next.  The plan is for another half inch of sand over the plastic (which will serve as a moisture barrier and a radon barrier) and then our first adobe layer - about 1" of "coarse" adobe mixed with some chopped straw and a little water - it will be tamped rather than poured, so not a lot of water.  We then plan for an inch of finer adobe/straw mix (using quarter inch mesh).  Our final layer of adobe will be poured rather than tamped and it will go through aluminum window screening.

Today, Saturday, was a work at home day.  Tomorrow is going to be a big day on the yurt site.  We plan to lay the plastic, put down another half inch of sand and then put down our first layer of adobe and hopefully get it packed.  We have a lot of water stashed on site and bought 3g "piss pump" (garden sprayer) that we will use to spritz water on as needed to help with tamping.