Ajda Pratika

Leafing through this little booklet you will encounter different types of content: there are short fragments containing information about buckwheat and there are invitations to engage with the plant thanks to small actions and embodied exercises. There are recipes which accompany you through the year by considering phenological seasons, such as Winterly Rest or Pre-Spring. There are indications on how to cultivate the plant and how to take care of the garden, following the ten seasons of the phenological calendar. There are longer texts exploring Slovene cultural artefacts connected to buckwheat, such as kozolci, hayracks where buckwheat was dried and stored, or žrmlje, hand-mills, witnesses of the everyday labour connected to grains.

‘Ajda Pratika’ also contains traces of Slovene cultural production linked to buckwheat, from traditional folk songs, to legends as well as older and newer poetry production. Beside poetic content, it also includes a more scientific collection of information, with data about the world production of buckwheat, the nutritional values of buckwheat flour or kaša in comparison to other grain and in-depth research about amino acids contained by the plant. ‘Ajda Pratika’ is not a finished object: on the contrary, you are invited to use it as a manual or source of information and at the same time as a journal that enables you to fill it with your observations, thoughts and experiences.