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Bushcraft Containers: Washing & Sterilising

Description

A simple method of Sterilising pots in the field. Pot Ash can also be used if a pan scrubber isn't carried.

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Video Transcription

you

hi there guys I've been out trekking around the woodlands today trying out my new backpack I managed to get hold of a Maxpedition exam four pack from the United States and it arrived not too long ago

I've kitted it out and organized my gear and headed out into the woodlands today just tracking around just for a few miles just to see how it feels and how it wears and I've been very impressed with it and I will do a review on it soon this is the exam for so this is a far as well and the two look very similar the so far being a 28 litre the exam Thor is a 32 which is this one the bigger one and the Max Fisher brought these out some time ago it's sort of like a internal backpack or sorry an internal frame backpack it's their way of entering into that market but very good and very much more comfortable than my condor - you know when it's really loaded and it sits on the hips well and doesn't kind of ache your shoulders so I've been very happy with it I've also been out ideas some mushrooms today I brought my field guide hang and it's good to take advantage of this time of year there's plenty of mushrooms around and you know if you wait around too long they'll all disappear and you'll have to wait another year for the majority of the crop to be out so I've got some interesting ones in front of me I've got a cool tin arias a birch bolete a couple of rustlers and pips a porous battery limits which I was using as a plasterer a little bit earlier on in the day but one thing I normally do is stop and have lunch and that's generally my procedure throughout the day I sort of start off walking quite a long way I'll drink all of my water and I find the water source stop for lunch sterilize the water and have some food and I'm generally topped up to walk back again or carry on the rest of the day and make my way home but one thing I wanted to run past you today and what this video is about was cleaning your pots and pans you know cleaning your Steel's whilst you're out in the field you know so we all have to cook and we all use our pots and pans and sometimes a lot of people bring soaps and detergents and things like that with them to kind of clean all their kit you know if you try and take what's at home and you try and replicate it out here it doesn't always work so you've got to keep things simple and sustainable and that way a kit will look after itself and it will be a lot easier for you to do that as well for you to maintain it so what I bring with me it's one of these steel pan scrubbers and that's it and that's my cleaning kit for my pots and pans and I wanted to run through today how I use it so you can see first of all I'm just running an open fire here I do most of my cooking I open fire so having a heat source is all part of the process of cleaning this stuff then you don't want your heat source or your fire to burn out before you've cleaned your pots and pans so I've chucked a few sticks on there and I'm going to head down to my water source and get these things cleaned up because they're obviously covered with soot when they've been exposed to the fire and they're full of food and obviously don't want to leave that in there when I put it in my pack so this is our water source and it's very stagnant there are little pools like this dotted all over this little stream where it's obviously dried up over the summer because the water levels dropped obviously because there's not been much rain and it's been very hot in the winter this will be very high and it'd be flowing quite steadily and it'd be a much more reliable water source where you could drink from it by taking your container and putting it in facing it downstream and then taking it back up and just sterilizing it but when it's like this I would use a bandana and I'd layer that bandana four or five times and filled the container very slowly if I was drinking from it and that will help remove sediment and then I could sterilize it on the fire and it'd be safe to drink and I've done that many a time from water sources just like this one some of them have been worse but when it comes to cleaning I'm not using any detergent or soaps or anything like that i'm just using a pan scrubber scrubbing off the sediment from the fire and little bits of food which will just go on go into the water and they're not going to damage the environment so i've got nothing to worry about and while i am scrubbing pots and pans all I'm looking for is a little bit of liquid to aid in the scrubbing process just so I'm not kneeling in stagnant water I'm just going to take some water with my guide bottle and that way I have to stand in all of this muck and do some cleaning so I can use this just on the riverbank so now I've got some water and just pour a bit in here and just scrub with the pan scrubber like this little bits of food get collected in the actual scrubber itself it's quite useful actually and they're easy to get out as well so don't worry too much about that just yet but you can see that's cleaned out pretty well I can scrub the side as it's been in the fire and the underside too and then get that all cleaned up there it is nice and clean a few bits on it but I'm not too worried about that so that can be put aside that's ready for sterilizing with this guide bottle you might want to scrub off the sediment from the fire but eventually it gets caked on anyway - one's fairly new you can see it comes off some areas but not others you can take the majority off if you really want to so I've got all the food and sit off of these and they're clean to a degree if this was a really fast flowing clean water source and I trusted it I wouldn't really need to do much else to these you know I could just use them as they were if I was operating around a camp and I wasn't going anywhere I could leave them to the side and not worry about sterilizing them but because this water source is stagnant and horrible if I now want to use these or put them in my pack and leave I might want to dry them but more importantly I want to sterilize these in the fire you need to kill anything that's on them from this stagnant water source and the same can be done with this pan scrubber you can see you can just shake the water out of these and don't worry about little particles of food most of the particles of food have now being removed from that they've all just been shaken out so don't worry too much about food getting stuck in them it does come out very easily but this will go in the fire to become sterile and all of this can then go my pack drying clean and ready to use again so let's go back up to the fire okay so the fires burn tank almost there's lots of embers still they're still very very hot you can obviously just hover your hand over and I can't keep my hand there that's a nice hot fire and we can just put our piece of metal in the fire now they just sit them in the embers just like that and then that will sterilize them and dry them and then we can put them in our pack so you can see these are steaming away quite happily obviously when the steam stops waters gone but that doesn't mean you should take them off just means you leave them there for a little bit longer just make sure the whole thing is hot to touch almost too hot to touch and then you know it's fairly sterile and dry obviously and you can put it back in your pack but what I will say is just to look after your who steals if you have titanium products or thin sheeted products you don't want to put them on a really really hot bed of embers or an open flame

but they'll begin to warp especially really thin titanium products some of them will walk very badly and you'll notice in the instructions it says do not put on a fire without anything in it simply because you don't want it to warp and that's what they're sort of trying to avoid this guide Bowl can take a lot of abuse it's very thick surgical steel and this thing here which is very hot now I don't really care too much about that little scrubber because I can obviously get another one if I leave it there by mistake but my mug here and you can see that's that's pretty much too hot to touch now then I get the neck very quickly you can use a stick obviously and not just deal what I do and grab it you can see that that's sterile now and nice and dry and I'll wait for the others to finish and then we can just brush them off and put them in the pack so we've washed and sterilized our pots and our pans and obviously if we had some fresh drinking water we could transfer that to this cup and drink quite happily and not worry about that contaminated water being in there and the nice thing about this is your kits clean and dry and it can just go straight in your pack now there's a bit of ash on it and what I usually do is just find a bit of moths on tree and it just wipes them off the moss just wipes the gas shot you can even just use your hands if you really want to or a bandana you know that's a that's it exactly the way it came out and this scrubby thing just literally do that just flick a bit of the ash off there you can see it just dis colours really it doesn't actually um you know bernal degrade too badly if you just put it on embers and let you know if you're roasting it on a really hot fire you can ruin them that can go in there and we got our guide bottle and I can just be the same there we go so the lid can go back on that that's all ready to go back in the pack if you've got titanium spokes or steel pots and pans you can obviously put those on the fire and sterilize them if you've got a wooden spoon like this you can't do that you can wash this as I did down at the river and then just leave it to dry for a while and it will be okay to use

provided it is properly dry and you can leave them around the fire to dry off but the best thing to do if you are going to use it around the camp again and again and you know you are is just to kind of not wash it down at that dirty water source and either use some clean water at camp or use your hands or lick off the bits of food and leave it somewhere you know and that way it's never really going to get contaminated because I'm not going to be using this for a little while now I know that I can wash it and just take it away with me and not worry about it but if you are operating a camp you might just want to keep it up here and not expose it to that dirty water so I hope that video helped out guys with just cleaning pots and pans in the field with minimal kit required and you're not having to rely on any kind of unsustainable soapy stuff's that you you're buying and bringing out with you that could potentially contaminate water sources you don't really want them kind of in your kit anyway because just another kind of expendable item that you're depending on if you refine your systems properly you can find really easy ways around things just with the tools you've got out in the field and it can become very very sustainable washing kits and maintaining kit is very simple it's just you'll find you'll meet a lot of people you don't actually do it on the right and they leave it to when they get home you know as an excuse for using it in the sink and washing up and stuff but it's best to do these jobs outdoors because then you really do push your kit and develop it even simple stuff like hygiene and washing pots and pans all these little jobs they can often be the most important sometimes they can really kind of make and break your morale and your outside just doing jobs around a campfire sounds silly but it is true but there are other things you can use if you want to go like fully natural with it you know if you want to just take your containers out and go very minimal you can use Spagna moss as a pan scrubber it just doesn't do as rough a job as the steel scrubber obviously but you can

use it and it does work just fine you can also use different types of funghi like that mushroom I use as a plasterer earlier tip tape or a spatula ness or birch polyfill that when it gets mature will develop a very kind of yellow scary thick layer underneath the bracket thus pouring tubes and if you dry it it will become like a pumice stone and if you soak it in water you can soften it up a little bit and it can be a bit more pliable to work with and you can clean your whole body with one of those and they are very useful just like a sort of mild pumice stone brilliant for scrubbing pots and pans as well so it really just depends on how you want your kit to be structured and what resources you really think are going to be available to you and the environment you're in and obviously of course how long are you going to be out there so I hope this video helped and thank you for watching again you can always check me out on Twitter I've got a Twitter account now and also you've got a website so I'll be doing updates on there fairly regularly from now on so thank you again for watching and hopefully I'll see you in the next video thanks again guys and take care

About the Author

MCQBushcraft

MCQBushcraft

I'm a UK based outdoorsman who started hunting and fishing with my friends when I was young.

Educating yourself about your surroundings and having the core skills to sustain yourself using your environment is a lost curriculum in the United Kingdom. We are well provided for, so well that "why do anything if somebody else will do it for you". This lifestyle has drastically disconnected people from having the knowledge and skills required to spend even one night in the woods and not get hungry.

I love being outdoors and have never lost the desire to learn and practice skills that I get a sense of natural connection from. Hunting hangs controversy in the minds of many, but in my eyes there is nothing more natural if you choose to eat meat. I appreciate that not everybody hunts in moderation though.

Thanks for reading
Michael McQuilton

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