"damp straw" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is often used to describe a situation in which straw or hay has enough moisture to cause it to stick together. For example, you could say: "We spread out the damp straw in the barn to dry."
They had lit fires of damp straw to keep the bugs away; the sharp-smelling smoke coiled around.
Traditionally, after an unsuccessful vote officials would add damp straw to the ballots to make sooty black smoke.
Scratch open the soil under the rooted spots, cover those joints with a thin layer of soil or damp straw, and water well.
His shiny exhibits are sweaty with animal vitality (you can almost inhale the aroma of damp straw and steaming dung), but also strangely caught in a frozen social ballet, even when, ostensibly, they're pitchforking hay or watching a foxhound finish off a stag.
Damp straw was once added to the stove to turn the smoke black, but over the years there has often been confusion over the colour of the smoke.
Originally, in the event a pope was not elected, damp straw was added to the fire to create dark smoke.
When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man.
She rattles off 25 or so, ranging from berries to straw, damp earth, leather, Moroccan spices, even the "ice-cream school" -- vanilla, butter, crème brûlée.
"Farm equipment lies tangled in lace; mice and squirrels have incorporated threads and needles from sewing baskets into nests or tunneled deep into the opulence of damp horsehair and straw," the photographer Rosamond Purcell wrote in a book about Mr. Buckminster, "Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things".
This one is sweet and grassy, with a hint of barn straw and damp car seat; that one smoky and peaty, with notes of dried moss and wet sheepdog.
The season for Tuber magnatum Pico -- a fungus that looks like a potato, smells and tastes like nothing else on earth (straw, honey, damp earth, spices, garlic and noxious effluvia have all been mentioned) and costs upward of $2,000 a kilo -- lasts until January.
