 Welcome to day two of Backgarden Bushcraft with Ellis Brigham and Fjarrraven and today we're going to cover fire lighting. Yesterday we talked about building a shelter so hopefully you've now got a shelter protecting you from this sort of pretty wet weather and now we're going to really make that shelter home by learning how to make a fire. Fires are vitally important and looking back through our history as a species it's fire that separated us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We learned how to light fires and once we learned how to light fires we were able to use it to cook food, to make it taste better, to make tools and to protect ourselves against wild animals and to keep warm on really cold nights. So having the skill to light a fire connects you with our ancestors but also can make the wilderness or even your back garden homely and safe and warm because at the moment it doesn't really feel like that. So fire is really important and a really useful tool but it can also be very dangerous and cause a lot of damage so before we start lighting fires we need to check a couple of things. First off we need to have mission to light a fire where we want to. We can't just go into a local park and start lighting fires because we'll get in trouble. So I've got permission this is our back garden so I give myself permission to light a fire here so that's number one tick. Number two we want to make sure that the fire can't get out of control and cause any damage. We're using a fire dish which is perfect because the fire can't spread out of that and it's not going to cause any damage to the ground. If you haven't got one of these and you've got a bit of grass what you can do is dig up the grass leave the top bit of grass off to the side somewhere burn your fire in the hole that you've created and then when you finished you can put the grass back over the top and it will hide the fact you've ever had a fire there which is what we want to try and achieve. We also want to make sure that the fire can't catch anything else alike so I wouldn't want to build it next to a wooden fence or a wooden shed because if that was to catch fire we'd be in a lot trouble as well. So making sure we've got permission and that it can't spread and that there's nothing flammable nearby. Those three things are really important. So once we've got permission and we know that it's safe and not going to spread anywhere and catch anything else alight we want to always make sure that we've got an adult present with us when the fires are light and anything in the fire or near the fire we have to assume is going to be really hot so we don't want to go in and start grabbing things because we're likely to burn ourselves. So that's the safety out the way but once the fires are light we still have to make sure that safety is always the first thing we think about. Right lighting a fire then it's really exciting and it's a really good skill however the problem with fire lighting is the more you need it the harder it is to light. If it's a really nice dry sunny day and all your fuel is nice and dry it's easy to light fire but you're warm and you probably don't need it but if it's weather like this and it's wet and cold you really need a fire to stay warm but everything's wet and it's much harder to light so that's when good fire skills really pay off. I don't want this to sound too much like a school lesson but there are some things that we need to bearing mind when we're lighting a fire. So I'm sure lots of you will have seen this before and this is what we call the fire triangle. If it's new to you it's really simple we need three ingredients to make a fire. It's a bit like making a cake you put in eggs flour and butter and then those are the ingredients to make your cake. For fire we need fuel, heat and oxygen. Now the fuel will be burning is wood the heat source we can use a lighter we can use some matches we can use a fire steel that creates hot sparks and the oxygen well that's all around us so we can't really do too much about that at the moment but we can sometimes blow on a fire and that puts more oxygen into it. So once you've understood that basic thing there's one more thing we need to think about we've got our ingredients this is my fuel this is my heat source and we've got oxygen all around us as we've said so in theory this should light but it's not going to and it's not going to light because my fuel source is too big or my heat source is too small if I had a flamethrower then that would probably burn but unfortunately I haven't got a flamethrower and they're quite dangerous so we need to make our fuel much smaller. If I take some dead twigs which I collected yesterday again they're made of wood so the fuel is the same the heat source is the same but the key thing is a fuel is much smaller now this is a good example that too much oxygen can also put a fire out because the wind is blowing my lighter out a little bit so now that my heat source and my fuel are in a better proportion that's going to start to burn like that so it's just like making a cake. If I put the ingredients in as eggs, flour and butter but if I put a hundred eggs and a teaspoon of flour and a ton of butter all the ingredients there but it wouldn't be a very nice cake it's exactly the same with fire we need those three ingredients but they need to be in the right proportions. If you're ever struggling to light a fire have a look and make sure that the size of your heat source is in relation to the size of the fuel so now that we understand the fire triangle we need to look at our fuel and it comes in like four main stages the first stage is tinder and that's the finest smallest fuel today we're going to use cotton wool with a little bit of Vaseline in it but if you're out in the wild you could use dry grass birch bark bird's nest that aren't used anymore anything that's dry and fluffy so that's our tinder the next stage is our kindling and that's going to be a big bundle of small sticks not much thicker than a pencil and the key for this is that when I'm collecting them I try and snap like that and you see how they break nice and cleanly that tells me that they're dead I also found them hanging up in trees I didn't find them off the ground where they can be really wet so they're off the ground they're nice and dry and when I snap them they snap really quickly and cleanly and a friend once told me that if it makes a sound like a crackling fire then it's going to burn well the next stage once these are burning is to put on sticks about finger to thumb thick and I always use body measurements because I'm not going to carry a tape measure out with me in the wild so I can just use I've always hopefully got my fingers and thumbs with me so I can just use those and say right that's about finger thick that's going to be the next stage and again it snaps nice and cleanly so I want a nice big bundle of those as well once those are burning then we go into our main fuel so that's our last stage really and that can be anything about wrist thick and bigger if I was building a massive fire I could put whole tree trunks on there but we want to keep our fires nice and small because they're much easier to manage they're much safer and they use a lot less firewood if I was to build a bonfire in the back garden here I think the fire upgrade would be over pretty quickly it's really important that you prepare properly to make a fire if I rush into this and I get a fire going and I have to run off and get some more fuel by the time I come back my fire might be out so preparation preparation preparation that's key to successful fire lighting especially when the weather's a bit grim like it is at the moment so I've got everything ready to go next to me I'm going to light my fire here so let's get going okay this is the exciting bit this is where we get ready to light our fire the first thing we want to do is take some of our sticks that are about finger or thumb thick and put them down on the ground this does a couple of things actually three things the first thing it does which is really important is it protects the fire from the coal potentially wet ground early on the second thing it does is allow more oxygen which we know is one of our key ingredients for lighting fires it allows more oxygen to travel in underneath and the fire is going to burn hotter and because these sticks are nice and dead and we know they're dead because they snap nicely these will eventually start to burn as well and when they burn it will give the fire a really strong heart so it's less likely to go out so dead stick platform is always useful sometimes I do this in the snow and in order to stop the fire disappearing down through the snow we have to build a dead stick platform like a foot thick so that it doesn't burn and disappear once we've got that sorted we get our bundle of twigs the thinnest ones we have and we kind of pull it apart like so so we have two bundles when I collected these I made sure that they're about as long as my arm it's really easy to get into the habit of just breaking all the twigs much smaller but the problem with that is when you come to put tiny little twigs on the fire your fingers have to get really close to the flames and the flames are really hot so you'll burn yourself but by keeping the twigs really long I can burn them and still move them without burning myself because I'm not fuel the wood should be burning not me so now I can take these two bundles and control them really easily so our first stage can you remember what it was called tinder that's right okay so we take our tinder which is our finest material and this case it's cotton wool but you could use newspaper scrunched up you could use birch bark there's lots of things you could use we're using this because it's the easiest and it's what we had in the bathroom upstairs so I'm going to take that I'm going to put it on my dead stick platform and then I'm going to take my fuel source I could use a lighter like so or I could use a fire steel so this creates a big shower of hot sparks and then that's going to set that alight and then my two bundles are ready right next to me so I don't have to run off and gather them they're right here and I can put them straight on okay so let's go I'm going to use the fire steel because this is my favorite method sometimes it takes a little while to get the sparks where we want them but there we go now that's starting to burn I'm not rushing because I've got plenty of time I take one bundle of twigs and I place them over the top now I haven't let go of them and because they're nice and long I'm not burning myself and I don't want to squash the flame because it's going to extinguish it it's going to cut out all the oxygen and we know that oxygen is a key part a key ingredient for the fire so I can still control it I need to make sure that the flame is touching the fuel otherwise you'll never catch fire and also there's enough oxygen in there in a minute this will start to crackle like your cereal in the morning snap crackle and pop and once that starts happening then I'm going to put the next bundle on over the top so we can see the flames are just starting to come through there now so I can take my next bundle I can place it over the top there sometimes you just have to be a bit patient with fire and let it do its thing as long as it's got all the ingredients it will burn now where I positioned the second bundle of twigs was really important I put it straight over where the flame is and in a nice tight bundle because if it's really spread out it's not going to burn that well and I lay in what we call a V all the sticks on top so they're all directly over that central bit of flame there now I can see the flames are growing there's a bit of smoke which we'll talk about in a minute but the flames are growing I can now put my finger thick and thumb thick sticks over the top and again I like to keep these nice and long because it's just easier to handle can you hear that popping that's a really good sign it tells me I've got a happy fire if there was lots of smoke and not very much flame I'd be a bit worried it wouldn't be very healthy at this stage the fire is really hungry so it's important to feed it and give it lots of fuel but I'm not just taking the whole basket of fuel and dumping it on top I'm taking a little bit at a time and placing it on top of the fuel I've already put down so that's burning really well now if I was to put some more fuel on it I'd want to put it on in that V pattern so always adding fuel in that way and that's a really good way to grow a fire you might notice when you put more fuel on that you get a lot more smoke because the fires just sort of struggling to start burning that new wood it's not a problem but if you wanted to add more oxygen which is what the fire needs you could get a baking tray or a frisbee or a paper plate and fan it and that puts lots of oxygen into it that's a really safe way to do things I haven't always got that with me when I'm on my trips so I just get used to blowing into the fire but it's really important that you don't get too close because the fire can get too close to your face and you can lose your eyebrows and look a little bit silly so take a nice big breath and imagine you're blowing out candles on a birthday cake it's a nice long steady blow and then I lean back taking a nice clean breath of air and blow again that's burning really nicely enough really nice and warm and even though it's still a bit cold and wet I feel quite snug and warm in my shelter I've got the roof above me I'm not getting wet from the rain and the fires giving me lots of warmth so it's feeling really homely of course it wouldn't be a campfire without some marshmallows and I think no matter how old you are roasting marshmallows over a fire is still a pretty amazing thing to do so I've just got a stick here and you could use a skewer from your kitchen and you just need to make sure that it's not a stick that's from a tree that's poisonous so something from the kitchen would be easiest to know it's safe and I personally like my marshmallows slightly burnt on the outside gooey in the middle with a chewy center so my technique is to let them just about catch fire and then blow them out sugar gets really hot so you want to be careful that you just put it straight into your mouth you need to blow on it and let it cool down and also waving around marshmallows on the end of sticks is really dangerous because they can fly off and I've seen a couple of accidents where people have ended up with marshmallows on their faces and have got burnt so be really careful with this now that's pretty good but to make it better we can make a s'more and that is a couple of your favourite biscuits or cookies with a melted marshmallow in between look at that well there we go even though it's still raining underneath this shelter with the fire burning it feels really warm snug and homely fire was so important for our ancestors it meant safety warmth good food and could even scare off predators I love just sitting and looking into the fire and I think it connects with a really old part of our brain it might be something we've lost a bit because we live in houses that have got central heating electricity and sometimes I think the flickering of a TV replaces the flickering of a fire so wherever possible it's always nice to get outside even if it is just in your garden lighter fire sit around it cook some marshmallows enjoy the warmth the friendship and tell some good stories we would love to see your creations so please upload using the hashtag back garden bushcraft to be with a chance of winning a far-raven goodie bag and one lucky family at the end of the week will win a whole family of backpacks good luck there we go once you finish the fire you need to make sure it's out the easiest way to do that is to get a watering can or the garden hose or even a saucepan from the kitchen with some water on it pour water all over the fire until there's no longer any flame smoke or heat in there once you've done that you can leave it fires at a left when they're still burning can cause a lot of damage so it's your responsibility if you've started it to make sure that it's out properly