Bushcraft Skills | How to use bramble as a withie

Description

In this video i show how to easily strip bramble of its thorn and demonstrate how strong it can be if used as cordage

Tags: YouTube Editor,bushcraft,Ray Mears' Bushcraft (TV Program),Bear Grylls (Author),Bramble,blackberry,survival,rope,knots,scouts,Camping,Survival Skills (TV Genre),expedition,seasons,how too,foraging

Video Transcription

hi guys what I've got for you today is another foraging video now the video that I'm doing today isn't about an edible food although the plant we're looking at does produce an edible berry and it's a plant that most of us will probably be familiar with now particularly we spent any time outdoors in the woods as a child you probably at some point cut yourself on this planet by yourself tangled up in it so the plant I'll be looking at today requires me to work gloves you don't have to wear gloves you can take I've seen people doing this like an old towel or a good thick bit of cloth but I find I've got sort of leather specifically leather garden gloves work the best okay I've used brambles quite a lot which is what we're looking at today and it is actually starting to snag my gloves off a little bit so I try and be careful now I've got two pre-cut pieces of rumble here today and I've met I've pre-cut them because I couldn't get a good angle into the thicket where I got these from from which brings me to my first point about the brambles bramble tends to grow in places like hedgerows and grows in thickets it's been very very long and it's very very strong in the autumn time it does produce very nice very good for you blackberries which I'm sure you've probably all tried you can actually buy them in the supermarket as well what foraging PR is much better now this year I've had my fill of black reason I've not done a video on them but I will do next year what I'm gonna be looking at today is a different use of the brown dwarf bramble okay so it's pretty easy to identify the brown wolf the main thing to look for is if you've got nettles and Bracken fern growing in a place where it's all overgrown and very untended

you will almost certainly find Brown Walker's a place for birds like to live and the birds spread the blackberry seems I want to detail reasons so the blackberry grows these quite big leaves now the leaves can be used or dying now mixed with different chemicals I cap and rock the top of my head what they are you don't just get green down you can get green deities but you can also get red and purple possibly blue I will double-check that while you do it do it a bit later on the use of the bramble today is going to be looking at another way of identifying it it's the thing that you will have encountered probably as a child as these thorns and it's the stem brambles really why it's very thorny girls very very look very very very long but it's fire ring that means you know that it's at least two years old it only grows nice flowers its second year so the first thing I want to do today is I'm gonna strip all these little shoots off this so they come off really easily a little sharp knife these days the whole all the way along because I'm gonna be using this to create a witty today now you can create cordage out of this well honestly you don't really need to process it out much depends what you want to use it for but today I'm going to be showing you this useful assorted so neater wanna take your time even if it's just a temporary Withey you know don't rush things we like things look nice and neat and it will make your life easier

spike myself with it that's why I'm wearing gloves it's very spiky these thorns are absolutely lethal just yesterday I cut all the back of my legs open trying to get some birch brambles I didn't see okay so now the next thing we need to look I don't wanna be wearing gloves all day particular you're doing this in summer so we need to strip those thorns off so I'm going to make sure my looks good there's no holes in them and then all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go now the way that the the bramble spikes grow they'll grow in one direction they don't go straight off they all grow so I think it's predominantly towards where the plant shoots for the main part so what I'm gonna do and we'll start the thin end run my hand along you can probably hear the breaking and the scratching those phone's going off and once I've got the majority of them I'm gonna go all the way against the spikes now

don't be lulled into a false sense of security with this stuff I've got those thorns off but if you look carefully you can still see the bumps where they are and just do that with my bare hand those are they're not spiking they're such but they're gonna give you a nasty nasty scratch if you try and pull them too long so I want to keep my gloves on for this bit one thing you can do if you really want to make this smooth Oh below the camera there one thing that you can do is

you can oh I can't frame myself today what's wrong with me you take the back your knife and just spend a bit of time rubbing them off so you get this and they go nice and smooth okay be careful though if you're gonna do this don't do it too hard because you don't like damage the fibers inside sorry inside outside and inside the stamp itself I'm doing this is quite nice because it starts to take those little stumps off which might get in your way depends what you're using it for okay so this is quite sturdy piece okay one thing that I want to try and avoid doing is and I'm going to do it here just to demonstrate in a little while it can break hopefully they'll go right for me you don't want to snap it like that

that little cracking sound you heard so you can get it again just without there that's those fibers breaking we want those fibers to stay good we can strip them off like we've done with nettles in the past these long fibers but with the bramble it's better to keep them actually on the stalk okay so that's nice and smooth now I'm still going to keep my gloves on cuz I've cooked a little spikes left on there what we can do with this now this is this will make a exceptionally strong with E so Madhu's I'm just going to show you oh it's very tough I'll show you sorry guys I'll show you just how tough this can be sorry it's squeezing my hand already so wrap that around and then this is very soft very tough indeed I like to use this I'm really putting all of my strength into that and it's not breaking foot in there as well

now foots broken it reason my foots broken is because it did that thing that shows you up here to break it my hands wherever you bend and break those fibers it will snap at that point well that's still pretty tough actually so we're gonna say and I like to use the the brambles as a hanger for my pot if I'm using the tripod or something or I sometimes will wrap a piece of it around a tree to hang my toes off if I've forgotten to wring enough cord with me which it doesn't happen all that happen but it isn't nice to use nuts or things doesn't leave this behind now one thing I did want to show you I've got another piece of bramble here now as far as my word I'm not a botanist so I've got this wrong please do let me know

but the brambles are actually all part the same plan that just hybrids of the same are the same thing I couldn't find much information on it but this particular one it's a very nasty looking fella look at those spikes on that and I'm hoping that's focused improperly so you don't want to be using that with your bare hands you know it's gonna hurt some sort of pull it's all these stalks off again and show you that it'll work just as well but one thing I would like to show you and I think it's work I'm just gonna move the camera of this tree here if you're trying to produce quite a lot of this stuff one thing you can do to get all those spikes off so you've got it works better with a post this so I don't know whether this a girl word but I'll give it a go you can wrap it around the three sides cause is it pulls spikes off okay how do those any pieces because you need to hold on as you can see it's not this method is also pulling off some of those suits so there we go that's that's incredibly smooth that's what it really well I should use pine trees more often so complaining about them okay so it's still a little bit rough but I can run my hand along there quite quite hard and that is relatively smooth so I'll do now is I'll just demonstrate the strength of this stuff again around the tree and how you can use it as a wiggly tree so that's well wrapped around that tree now and I can put a lot of pressure into that what's up against it and that isn't breaking it's reasonably tough you can't know any particularly intricate knocks with it but because it stays that little bit rough this this green chute here will probably break because it's fresh I've just put a note a simple overhand knot in that and you can see how tightly that's bound on although because actually starts to bite into itself fantastic stuff bramble I love using it so yeah and you can the great thing about using brambles are winning you can get quite a lot of it very very quickly if you found a place where it grows it has an advantage over using spruce roots and different types of roots because you have to dig those up you have to find and dig them up and spend a reason one at a time getting them bonus using them is you don't have to process and like you do with this but this is very very easy it's much easier than digging or digging up spruce roots you can reduce bramble down into a cordage but it's not particularly strong if you reduce it down I will do a video of that in the future when I get around to actually needing some bramble cordage for decorative purposes or whatever and well there you go that's the use of the bramble as a witty as always please drop me a like and a comment and subscribe whatever it's fantastic to hear feedback thank you all I know sometimes I come across speed a bit sharp when I reply to the comments I don't mean to be I'm just not very good at typing things so don't let that put you off if you have any more information about what's in this video please do let me know I'm still learning you know I'm not trying to be a know-it-all if you know more than me about a subject let me know and I will then put it in one of my videos you