Straw
We all know the scenes of combine harvesters plundering fields with their heavy machinery, but do you know how it was done before? When corn was planted manually and in the summer, often in the greatest heat, reapers sweated with scythes in their hands, while girls sheaved and built stooks? We do now – we have tried it all personally. In the sphere of corn processing, we have focused on an old long-stem variety of rye whose straw can be used for the production of thatch and weaving of bread baskets. The impulse for planting corn (and precisely this kind of rye) was the need to cover the roof of a reconstructed prehistoric half-dugout. At present, we are able to grow and process rye and cover a roof with a method that was used for centuries and that often lasts longer on the roof than modern materials. Straw unsuitable for the production of thatch (straight and unbroken straws are required for that) is not thrown away but further processed. People of the first half of the 20th century had to do everything themselves, and bread baking was one of these activities. Shallow straw baskets in which bread rose were needed for that. As we endeavoured to do also this daily or weekly activity, we needed to produce our own bread baskets. Everything is related to everything else, and the cycle of corn and grain processing ends in a bread basket with a freshly baked loaf of bread.