This is the fifth in a series of videos on the topic of natural tinders for bushcraft after previously covering inner barks, outer barks, fungus and downey flower heads. But of course there’s always things that don’t fit into any catergory, so this video is about some of the other natural tinders that we can […]
Birch is an incredibly useful tree for us in bushcraft, from providing tinder and kindling, to sap to drink and bark to make containers. It’s the second most common tree in the Britiush Isles (after oak) and is pretty straightfoward to identify. If you can only identify one tree, birch would be a good one […]
Outer barks are a great resource for fire lighting and provide us with another tool in our bushcraft repertoire. In this video I talk about using a few outer barks as a tinder, including birch, cherry, hornbeam, honeysuckle and clematis. I’ve written about using outer barks as tinder in this post previously, take a look at […]
I wrote a post a few years ago about various fungi that can be used as a tinder, including King Alfred’s Cakes (Daldinia concentrica). They get their name from the legend of King Alfred who, whilst in hiding from the Danes, let some cakes burn, and they do indeed have that appearance. Here in Kent […]
Sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) is a fairly common tree in Kent and we have a couple of sizable compartments of it in our woodlands, in fact a couple of years ago we coppiced about an acre of it over the winter. It was introduced by the Romans as a food source but there are other […]
Whilst I’ve previously written about fire steels in this post from 2017, we’ve put together a 10 minute video showing how to go about getting the most out of your fire steel. It includes demonstrations of the push forward method, the thumb push and the pull back methods as well as a couple of techniques […]
