I call it broomstraw. Others broomsedge. Whatever you call it, it doesn’t kill my memories of my grandmother’s homemade brooms. About a yardstick long, they stood in corners throughout the ...

Old-fashioned brooms and walking sticks hang to dry all around the small building. ... Zukowski said that sorghum is better broom material than straw and can last for generations.

His hands are stained an indelible green from 58 years of making brooms. “I make ’em the old-timey way,” 80-year-old Samuel Fine said. “I make ’em by hand.” The … ...

LONG GROVE, Iowa — Bits of straw blew as Daniel Jepsen of Great River Brooms lowered a steel blade and trimmed the uneven ends of a kitchen broom in the making. Jepsen, a farmer in Miles, Iowa ...

Broom handles can be anything from driftwood to oak sticks used to dry tobacco leaves in Kentucky barns that can be more than 100 years old. No two Wicked Brooms are alike.

It used to be that a straw broom was set on the ground for a couple to jump over — one leap from a solitary life into marriage. ... This was when I was perhaps 7 years old, maybe 8.

The sorghum broom originated in 1797 when a woman asked her farmer husband to make her a new broom when her straw broom fell apart, Cox said. The farmer found his sorghum made a higher-quality ...

My memories of her sweeping those porches are so comforting that I cherished her last old-fashioned, straw broom. It was the kind that lasted forever and often left a straw or two behind.

But Folk — who won two Brier and world championships, one with a corn broom and one with a brush — still likes those old things. His team was one of three at the 1980 Brier that still used ...

Amid an array of colorful brooms dangling from the rafters and bundles of broomcorn stacked neatly in boxes, a skilled craftsman carries on a 200-year-old American tradition of handcrafting brooms.

A man in Ontario is taking one last whack at making and selling corn brooms for curling. It’s a small thing, and a tiny trade. The pulse of a once-booming industry can now be measured by the 20 ...