Article 2: The straw harvest: when wheat becomes your home

July is a busy month, but one of its most significant moments comes at the end of the month. This is when our project stops being abstract: the wheat harvested that day will literally become our walls.

I went there to watch the harvest. Seeing these images and this reality in the field, something crystallises inside me: it is no longer just a project on paper, it is now tangible. The straw that will shelter us is literally being born in the fields before my eyes.

Straw: a precious by-product

The wheat is harvested when it reaches maturity, and we collect the straw, the by-product of the harvest that would otherwise have been waste.

This straw must be carefully stored under cover until we need it to build our walls in October. That means more than three months of storage in a barn. We need to find the right place, prepare the barn and, above all, make sure our stock is protected from bad weather and excess humidity. This protection is crucial: we need really dry straw when we start production.

One important detail: the straw is neither chemically treated nor waterproofed. It arrives raw from the field. However, once compressed and prestressed in our cassettes in the workshop, then assembled into walls, the lime plaster on the outside and the finishes on the inside protect the straw effectively from moisture. That is the protection we must ensure meticulously: the straw itself is not treated, it is its final configuration that keeps it safe from water.

The call for volunteers

To get this huge task done, we are calling for volunteers. On the weekend of 3 and 4 August, we are looking for people ready to “do a bit of sport”. In practice, it will mean carrying hundreds of small straw bales into the barn to keep them under cover until October. The bales come in bundles of 14, which will make transport easier.

We promise a great day: sport, of course, but also plenty of laughs, cold beers and a barbecue if the weather allows. This is more than a call for labour; it is an invitation to take part in something special and to be part of a collective adventure.