How to make simple cordage from nettles

Description

the most basic cordage you can make from stinging nettles, without preparing the strands before hand for a quick fix when tieing stuff up.

Tags: YouTube Editor,Nettles,cookin,bushcraft,cord,cordage,rope,natural,natural rope,survival,bear grylls,Ray Mears (Author),camping,how too,how to,bush craft,kife,kinfe work,outdoors,education,scouts,activities,kids outdoors activity,Nettle (Organism Classification),summer,Fun,Family,Survival Skills (TV Genre),Outdoor,Travel,Holiday

Video Transcription

actually all right guys and got another video for you today on useful plants in bushcraft and this one really easy and if I hopefully most of you should recognize what it is and realize i am wearing gloves and it is this little fella which is the stinging nettle actually a really useful little plant because to start with these fresh buds that grow on the top here if you pull them off they grow back again fresh and you can make tea out of them and you can make soup out of them really really tasty actually it's from my favorite her loyalty I'll took some recipes up for those on the blog which i'll give you the website for shortly but today what i'm gonna be showing you is how to make good cordage out of them as you can see they grow quitting tall and they're also quite a sturdy plan what things remember when you're doing this is please work loss unless you're really brave and you want to try and find the method to pull the mats and pull the nettles up without stinging yourself I've tried it I can't work it out and I really hate being that all they have just met on myself before we started filming spinachy-- so please be careful I should be wearing long sleeves for this but I just realized I forgot to put on but I'll be alright i'll just have to man up and deal with it ok so to collect your nettles what you want to be doing is whilst wearing your gloves push them out of the way take those leads off if you're making a soup you can keep them to go in the soup that's which potatoes and stuff then reach right down to the base of the nettle and pull it off in one fell swoop like that take all the leaves off give it a good rub down try and get all those stinging hairs off it that's your metal now to make a piece of cordage you do need a good bunch of this stuff so I'm gonna collect some more you need it we really do need quite a punch three two one action okay so I've collected my nettles up a bit of a bunch not not loads I could get more I've wanted to make a bit more cordage what this for what I'm doing today is absolutely fine for me and the first thing I do is I'm just going to process these a little bit now the camera prolly won't pick this up but on there you can probably just about maybe make up some of those hair still and other things are going to sting you so to try and get the majority of those off what I'm going to do is still wearing my gloves just really going to give each stabbed over the rug down and then double check see they're all gone majority of those are gone now you can keep it goes on to do this but makes part that's quite difficult okay so i think that with each one's I come to it the other thing I want to do is get the roots at the bottom they're no use to me so this is a really long but now it's all I'm going to do is you can see I've tried to snap this one off it's pulling apart the string and that is what makes our call it so I'm going to cut them off instead very easy cut through so that's that bit gone let's cut the other routes off the others some of these are quite so fastly it does make them cottage and there we go thats those ready so the next thing i want to do is using my process metal stocks all the hairs robbed often is get yourself kind of like a little beta something hard to beat it on all you want to do is whack it all the way along I'm going to get sprayed with metal juice doing this because it does contain a lot of juice in the store babe it's just by my eye that doesn't sting so don't worry about that juice cut the end off that works it's a bit thin not much use to so once you've done that you can see it starts to break apart now these five is that you can see sites are born here that's what's going to make our cordage so the next thing to do is just taking the back of your knife you wanna open all that up I'm choosing to keep my gloves on here because you can still get a little bit storm it's not nice to have nettle stings when your fingers just gently personalized like not too hard you're not trying to cut into it i am using the back of the knife just drag it along takes all i can pour p stuff out of the center there

so I'll do this on all of them as you see we will start to break up and you end up with these long fibers my arms are too short for this job I'm a terrible rope maker so there you go you end up all these survivors now you need to this all of your stocks because the more of these fibers you have in your bundle the stronger your cord is going to be up a little bit more this end it's quite a nice process actually it's a good thing to do when you just set up camp and you've not really got much going on are you waiting for dinner to cook especially on your oh yeah I'm going to want to talk to bit like me here its my camera lens really boring it's just kind of reading that we can behind the camera there okay so once you've got all these fibers you wanna get more now really what you want to be doing with these is kind of drying them out on a warm day they dry out in about an hour or so couple of hours and they'll dry out while you're doing it if you leave them in the Sun or if you're doing them indoors just give them a couple of days to dry out nicely because then when they're dry they got much harder so again as you can see I've broken all those fibers up their balls off for this one ready for me to that's what myself should be well process now it's kind of like celery actually that starts to break up again I'm gonna take that central pith out that's the soft that's no use to you right on i'll smashing more fibers so again wants this open up the back of my knife probably nails it does make everything go kind of a really really bright green and I mean a really bright green it smells kind of good takes almost bottles of that I mean this bit you do have to be quite delicate with it because I probably saw then I splits on the fibers by pressing down too hard tonight okay so there's been sent those ready to go something to this office two things we two years

ok so these five is now quite hard on the roll or what we need to do is start twisting them together as i said i haven't drived these out now so they're not going to be as hard as they would be once it's dried out while there is when the core damn about the twist has dried a little I will do another short video just to show how strong is I mean it's not the strongest fiber in the world but it isn't

who's gently twist the whole thing built try and twist it in small sections so that's one section a metal core is there so that is quite bendable pliable pull all that through itself you can make quite simple nuts stuck with it ends up actually pretty strong so we need to do especially once it starts to dry it's really really starting to twist this stuff together and once it's dried out if you can hold if you can hold it between two things which will stop it twisting it does one of the twists itself this is kind of what you're aiming just like this that's what you want okay now that is pretty tough I'm really putting a lot of pull into that and it's not breaking so that's nettle cordage for you and it makes your hand smell good and go green as always thank you for watching please give me a like and a share and subscribe to me as well if you would if you like the videos I'm always open to suggestions anything you'd like to see any comments or feedback about the videos or different ways of doing things that you may try yourself and also please check out my blog which is forest of bushcraft wordpress com thanks for watching guys