Fire Safety, Winter Evenings, Billy Cans vs Other Stainless Pots | #AskPaulKirtley 50

Description

Welcome to Episode 50 of #AskPaulKirtley, where I answer questions about long winter evenings in camp, fire safety, when is safe to leave a fire, throwing coals into streams, billy cans vs other stainless pots, poisonous lookalikes to dandelions…

TIMESTAMPS:

01:35 Long winter evenings in camp

09:32 Fire safety - multiple-part question

23:03 When is safe to leave a fire?

28:18 Throwing coals into streams - good or bad idea?

31:19 Billy cans vs other stainless pots

36:49 Poisonous lookalikes to dandelions…

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Tags: bushcraft,survival,wilderness,camping,hiking,outdoors,question and answer,advice,questions,answers,bushcrafting,nature,self reliance,self sufficiency,outdoor skills,outdoor knowledge,Paul Kirtley,askpaulkirtley,fire,fire safety,billy cans,cooking pots,coals,embers,dogs,dandelions,poisonous plants,winter camps,cold winter evenings

Video Transcription

in this episode of a sport curtly we're going to talk about what to do in those long nighttime hours of winter camps I've got a number of fire safety questions we're going to talk about Billy cans versus other stainless steel pots and is there anything poisonous that we can mistake for the humble yet widespread dandelion

[Music]

welcome welcome to episode 50 of ask appalled curtly yes we've made it 250 episodes and if you've watched all of them or listen to all of them a massive massive thank you to your allegiance your attention and your interest in what we talk about on this show and on this podcast and for those of you that are new to this please go back and have a look at the previous videos or listen to the previous podcast because there's a lot of good information there but here's to the next 50 years to making a century please keep the questions coming and without further ado I'm going to jump straight into the questions here and it this first one is from instagram via instagram from Forrester bushcraft that's Peter Forrester and Peter's question is there's a lovely photo though it's absolutely fantastic we should just well on that photo there if you're listening to the podcast it's a lovely golden light just after sunset over the Lake District Hills is a little bit of cloud but not very much nice blue sky and but looking pretty chilly and pretty frosty and Peter's question is after spending a freezing cold night in the hills above bottom ear we awoke to a crisp clear day and a fantastic sunrise totally worth the troubles of the night before okay so that might be the sunrise I guess the night before this we suffer two issues both myself and Brian whilst we will warm our feet whilst dry were freezing cold before heading to our sleeping bags do you have any tips for overcoming this issue when fire isn't an option and you want to sit around camp the other issue we faced was boredom it was dark by 5:00 p.m. and too early for sleep and a very long time to do nothing but read and chat in the freezing cold how would you entertain yourself in a similar situation

and he said here we were fine in our sleeping bags warm enough in our sleeping bags yeah it's a nice question and so yeah I mean sitting around outside in the cold you are without a fire you are going to get cold and I'm assuming reading between the lines there that you had separate tents or separate shelters or whatever you were however you were being or sleeping and that meant that to sit and chat you had to be in the outdoor so there's a question now do you maybe want to reconsider when you're out in the winter taking those separate shelters maybe take something that you can share and get inside so that you can spend the time there and you're gonna if you can trap some warm air around you and just by being in it whether it's a small lightweight teepee shaped shelter or whether it's a more traditional and sort of tunnel or a geodesic design tent something that you can get into and isn't so big but you can sit in and you can take a flask of warm drinking with you or even have a jet boil in the vestibule for a brew later on in the evening you can get in and you can get comfortable and then you can get your boots off and you can get you can either get into your sleeping bag if you want to or maybe put on a nice fluffy spare pair of socks when I'm camping in the winter and hiking in the hills in the UK and by winter I mean any time when it's when it can be frosty on the ground and I always take a pair of socks specifically for putting on when I'm in my sleeping bag and so they're going to be dry and you know at the end of the day when were the best will in the world your feet are going to be a little bit damp from perspiration you know the socks are gonna be a little bit damp and perspiration and they don't really get the opportunity to dry off until you till you take them off and so and that's one of the reasons they get cold when you're sitting around and also cold feet is generally a sign that maybe you're a little bit bodily cold as well the other thing that I take in winter is some sort of duvet jacket dice and shuffle

nice hat to put on and some gloves and be nice and toasty warm but like I say sitting around outside when you've got clear skies above them as frost coming on the ground you're going to get cold and much better to be in your shelter and once you're in your shelter put your take you clearly taking your boots off put your fresh warm fluffy socks on and aren't too restrictive to help the blood flow into your feet get nice and cozy in your in your tent you can even put your sleeping bag over you rather than get in your sleeping bag if you if you still feel a bit cold and just chat and you know wile away the hours in the way that you might do outside but as you say it's a long old time clearly you need to put prepare some food and you know that's going to take some time in the evening before you get into into your tent you know when I'm at that time of year what I typically try and do is be pitching my my shelter my tarp on my tent or whatever I'm using around about dusk and then and particularly in the hills it doesn't really matter if you're cooking in the dark because you don't have to gather any firewood you're going to have to be using a stove of some description in the u.k Hills and so I have all everything that I need with me I have my fuel I have my food I can do that in the dark so I make the most of the time walking set up and camp just as it's getting dark and then cook and then that's probably going to take you till six o'clock in the evening possibly maybe a little bit earlier depending on how early it gets dark and then you've got the rest of the evening to spend yeah you can chat but then if you if you've run out of things to talk about it and then reading is good writing a diary writing a journal is good both of you guys this specific advice for you both of you guys have got YouTube channels great opportunity get away from it a little bit of a away from your normal circumstances great opportunity to brainstorm on what you might do for the coming year in terms of ideas for your channels and ideas for things you might write about if you write for a blog or you write for a magazine or whatever it is that you do those times I find really useful for that sort of thing that

I'm freed from external distractions I'm freed from any pressures on my time and that's a good time to be creative with ideas about whatever it is that you do and in your cases and you could apply that energy to ideas for videos for your YouTube channels for example and so that would be some advice and if if you learn how to and you know if you want to on a longer trip and you've you've exhausted your ideas Bank as it were and then you know the other thing that I quite like to do that is time consuming and I normally do it I'm driving but it is an option to do it when you're in a tent in the dark as well and you just have more hours than you have than you need for sleeping is listen to some podcasts and you know it long-form content that you can listen to and you can even download radio shows of podcasts so listen to interviews listen to documentaries and good opportunity to do that and audiobooks as well if you and if you don't like reading and audiobooks are great and in terms of whether it's biography or novels and and get lots of sleep you know often with it I personally I don't always get enough sleep when I'm working because I'm going from one thing to the next to the next and I've got deadlines and I'm trying to get things done in my business and I'm running courses and you know sometimes it's nice just to not have an alarm you know not have to and be woken up wake up naturally so if you go to bed early enough and sleep wake up naturally that does you a world of good as well so my winter camping experiences are always very much centered around actually enjoying the fact that I've got plenty of time in the evenings because there is less pressure around it than there often is in normal life so those are some of my thoughts around that so hopefully they're useful to you and maybe to some other people as well and enjoy those those moments when you're when you're camping out in the hills in the winter because they're fantastic okay fire safety questions now this one is from John Moseman and it's a little bit more - this is via email he's asked me four questions in the form of one question and I think what I'll do is I'll go through and I'll answer each one in turn so I read that part the question I'll answer it and then I'll go on to the next one okay so this is from John Moseman as I say and he says and thank you for providing such great info for free I have a couple of questions around fire safety have you ever been in a scenario where fire has gotten out of hand what caused it and what did you do to get it back under control and I've only ever been one situation where if I had got out of control and it wasn't in as I guess as always the case it's not expected so it wasn't in a camp it wasn't a campfire it wasn't anywhere where we we weren't even having fires on that trip in terms of campfires that's the interesting thing so it was a long time ago and I was hiking with some people that weren't weren't super good friends in the sense that I've never done a trip with them before and we were training for an event that we were doing an adventure race that we were doing and we were doing some hiking training and we were in Scotland and we were backpacking for a number of days and one of the guys had done virtually no backpacking before and he wasn't really familiar with what to do about going to the toilet and also one of the things with him was that the camping food seemed to make him need to go to the toilet several times a day so we've had to stop mid sort of middle of the day for him to go off behind a little grassy knoll because we were up in the hills and Scotland and sort of heather and grass and fog and no trees and few rocks and so he went so we left him and we walked down the Trey little bear and I would explain to him what to do to big and a little scrape to go to the toilet there to use a toilet paper and if it wasn't to dry in the surroundings and I'd explained to him that the best thing to do is to burn the toilet paper so that it wasn't left in the ground and and that it was you know left on the surface because it's you know it is just litter and it if it's left in the ground it doesn't decompose very quickly unlike the fecal matter which will decompose quickly and and if not if neither of those things if it burning wasn't an option and then to put it into a ziploc bag and bring it along until you could dispose of it so we were waiting and waiting and waiting and I went myself and one of the other guys went back up the trail a little bit to see this guy sort of waving his arms actors from about 100 meters back up the trail and then we could see a little bit of smoke and coming from near where he was and we suddenly clicked as to what the problem was so we went we dropped our backpacks we went tearing back up the trail and where he had been to the toilet and he buried his business and he'd gone to burn his toilet paper but contrary to what I said was that if it's dry don't burn it put it in the bag and take it and he'd set fire to some of the glass and I had taken into some of the Heather and there was a fan area that was ablaze and he had no idea what to do so we immediately begun began stamping out any any semblance of flame you know I was just horrified you know my adrenaline was going and was in it and this was this was early in the year this was in April and but had been a particularly dry beginning of the year and so and you know everything was Drive and normal and so we were stamping stuff out and the flame is expanding and we weren't catching everything and it was growing more quickly than we could stamp out so what we've ended is we took our shirts off and we started flashing the flames you could stamp out a larger area for example and there was a stream very very close so we damped our shirts in the stream and we stamped the flames with that we smash the flames we worked really really hard and there ended up all there being all four of us in the group doing that and the the fire had spread to you know it caught on material good few meters across but we did manage and that happened very very quickly and we managed to get it under control and damp it out and then we got water and put it on in areas and major and stayed and made sure it was wasn't smoldering and it wasn't really thing and we managed to get it under control but that is the only time I've ever had a circumstance where a fire hose has started into the into the undergrowth or into anything unintentionally and I've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of fires personally and I put it down to that guiding experience combined with probably my inexperience of explaining those things to people at that point I mean this is getting on for twenty years ago now so one of those things down to experience I'm very glad it didn't get any worse than it was as we all were I know of other people like ray Goodwin for example who I work with a lot he was on a trip with people in Sweden and he was camping on a regular campsite in fact the people who had been in the previous village where they'd hired the boats from had said that they were very welcome to stay on that campsite at the end of the lake and they stayed on on that and they noticed that after having the fire for a while that smoke was coming up from the ground quite a few metres away from the camp fire site and what happened was that classic thing but you read about a lot but thankfully you don't see very much where fire had caught a long route of a tree and had set fire to the ground further away luckily they were close to a lake of course being on the canoeing trip and they also had big blue barrel barrels for putting equipment and therefore they're able to get a lot of water onto and into the ground very quickly and other than that and I I have no personal experience or secondhand experience from people I know very well of fires getting out of hand thankfully and you know I'm always super super super careful and you know Leave No Trace in terms of leaving things as I find them making sure there's plenty water input you know my question always is if I ever have a camp fire could I in any way shape or form we Kindle a fire from what I've got left here in terms of just bringing the materials back together or blowing on them you know or you know there's need I make sure there's no heat left in anything whatsoever before I leave a fire and before I move on and if there are fire bans or if there's high fire risk then don't have a fire that's that's as simple as that maybe you have to take a stove with you instead second part of the questions are there any telltale signs that fire is getting or going to get out of hand and well you've already heard I've already kind of answered that in terms of smoke coming from the ground away from where the fire is and I think having read a number of accounts of other people and heard that account from ray Goodwin and that is one of the classic signs that you have a particularly a forest environment you have a fire and it gets into the root system of a shallow root of a tree and it goes along like a little fuse smoldering along and it comes out in the ground nearby and I've also heard a very soft leaf based policy loamy soil at having smoldered for quite some time as well and so smouldering away from the fire is clearly a sign that something is going awry that's one of the reasons why you should always clear back to severe earth if you're going to have a file on bare earth I'll have fire on on rock have it somewhere safe and where you're not going to set fire to and surrounding vegetable matter vegetative matter rather or grass or anything and your next part of the question and I guess feed into that part three so if you won't if you need a fire for cooking boiling water or heat when it's very windy how do you do that safely well in some circumstances you can't do it safely if it's windy and everything is super dry in the surroundings you are very likely going to blow sparks into a tinder dry environment and that's one of the reasons you end up with fire bans in in the summer in places because the risk is just too high it's also the reason why some provincial parks and national parks will say you can have a campfire but you can't burn paper you can't burn rubbish because that sends that's much more likely to send up a burning piece of material on the convective updraft and drop it into something that's very very dry and start a bush so if it's windy and it's tinder-dry they're the perfect conditions for bushfires

and maybe you just can't you know is that that's that that's it you you know it's out of respect for the environment it's out of respect for the people that have respect for wildlife that may lose its life or lose its habitat and it's out of respect for yourself because you don't want to kick yourself in the middle of a bushfire and because that could be lethal in itself but if it's windy and it's wet there isn't really any issue and other than trying to retain the heat for yourself and then it's about making sure that you're using wind brakes and that you're using a combination of the lay of the land and shelter and to make sure that you retain the heat where you need it because clearly putting a kettle over a fire even just that you know regardless of getting bodily warmth putting a kettle over a fire when wind is blowing the heat sideways rather than allowing it to go upwards is going to make your cooking and your boiling and all the other things much harder and so you need to make sure that you're using the as much protection as you can from the surroundings to try and make sure that you're keeping the heat where it needs to be number four and excuse me I see videos of popular bushcraft is lighting fires with fire reflectors and going to sleep only to find that in the morning their fire reflector was consumed by the fire is it unsafe or unwise and I don't think it's unsafe unless it's going to a mess it's unsafe to have a fire in the first place because you know if the fire is going to spread it will fire ill it'll spread from being a fire regardless of the fire reflector being on fire frankly I don't I don't put a lot of store in fire reflectors and that's a conversation for not not not for now and in the context of this question I think they're rapin vastly overrated and I think the best use for fire reflectors in is drying and warming firewood and if you're actually going to use it for heat the best thing to do is to set fire to it frankly because you then get a grill like heat so I don't think it's unwise I actually think in some circumstances it's quite sensible and in terms of getting heat from that wood and it's only going to be unsafe if it's unsafe to have a fire in the first place and normally the only time that there's a marginal benefit of having a fire reflector is in cold and possibly wet conditions and as I say you can use it to dry the external and elements of firewood that might be a bit damp on the outside and dry on the inside and in freezing conditions you can use it to warm it up a little bit so when you do put it on the fire not so much energy of the fire is used to getting up to heat where it'll actually catch light so that that's my thinking that you're probably not going to have a fire reflector in really hot dry conditions anyway so it's not going to add to any fire risk in those conditions and that brings us to the end of those questions from John so thank you for those questions and I've got one more question on fire here from Mick Mercer and he's probably having a bath as he listens to this if he's want to do hi Mick hope you're enjoying your soak and this question comes via Instagram and it's a photo of a fire quite a large fire that's been burning it's burnt down from its full extent and his question is and I've had a day volunteering and you know conservation volunteering I believe means what mix saying and he continued to say and one job was to burn a large amount of wood which we did my question is when it's safe to leave a fire unattended from a bushcraft perspective maybe thinking if you venture out from a base that has a large established fire you wish to keep in this was a big fire and I wondered what your thoughts are on leaving it in a state in the state in the photo I didn't because I felt it needed

watching for a bit and was and it was nice to be around and but I would like to know your opinion apologies for mine particularly great today and well it looks to me from that photo like it on an area of pretty bare earth and therefore it and it also looks quite damp and in the background there it looks frosty in the shade and that vegetation some of it looks I can't quite see but some of it looks like soft brush which suggests that the ground in the background is somewhat damp so I would say that having the fire when you did there was probably mmm absolutely zero risk of it catching fire into the ground because the ground is damp at the time of year of course and and the the general habitat around that was not one that would catch fire easily and so I would say it's relatively safe it would have been safe to leave that and certainly I've witnessed forestry operations where they burn large amounts of brush off and inside of the fires that I would never have and they'd leave them smoldering for days and it doesn't seem to spread I would be very concerned to do that personally but then and I think it's very find it very destructive and wasteful but that is one of the one of the practices and I prefer just to leave it to to go back into the the ground and provide food and habitat foods for fungi and habitat for insects and whatnot but that's not the way some of these modern forestry practices work that said and it doesn't seem to clearly they have a vested interest in maintaining the less precise from the commercial point of view and they clearly don't worry about having big fires not that far away from their from their commercial tree crop so that's quite at the right time of year so I would suggest having a big fire in and of itself isn't an issue and those sorts of sizes are fired away beyond any side to side that you would have in any small bush craft camp and in terms of leaving that and

again it goes back to this is why I answered your question on the back of the previous one it goes back to the general levels of fire hazard and if it's if it's very dry and then clearly there's a risk having a fire full stop and I certainly wouldn't be leaving a fire in those circumstances even if I thought on the margins it was okay to have a fire and and if I was in coniferous woodlands where we'd been there for several days and there was a chance that it could have got into some root system

I'd be very reticent to go off for the day leaving it and leaving it smoldering that said I have left fires and banked so that they're in when I come back on many occasions and you just have to take it on a case-by-case basis that if things seems so dry that there is a significant fire risk just from dropping say a match into the into the leaf litter then you probably shouldn't be leaving a fire and anywhere unattended under those circumstances and you should be watching it very very clear closely and and that that's the kind of rule of thumb that I would that I would use and when you leave the area make absolutely sure and this is the key thing and because fires can smolder for days particularly in coniferous woodlands where you've got a very light top level layer of soil you've got shallow root systems on some of the trees that's a dangerous combination if you've left something smoldering in the ground which is why we have those and Leave No Trace practices where we make sure that we put plenty water into the ground so that nothing can be smoldering away from where we've had the fire and then leave it as we found it as the best we possibly can and those are my those are my thoughts now clearly and that's very concise and there are may be particular circumstances that people want to talk about but that's a general a general thought there and then the last one on fires is from Andy and Andy asks hi pool a big fan of your channel and love the fact that you take the time to pass on your knowledge very welcome Andy and his question is once your fire has burnt out would it be an issue to the environment in any way if you were to throw the dead coals into a stream or Creek afterwards thanks for taking the time to read this well yeah in a nutshell it would Andy because wood ash tends to be quite alkali and throwing in you know charcoal and ash and covered coals or dead out dog ends of wood that's been on fire it's going to introduce different chemicals into the water and a lot of waterborne organisms are very sensitive to the pH level and while you doing it in the reasonable body of water is probably going to make such a marginal difference that it doesn't do anything as a practice if we all did it that might start to make a difference and so I would say it's not a good idea to do it and I would give you a general advice to try and make sure that you think ahead as to when you're leaving and make sure that you manage your fire in such a way that there's very little left before you make sure it's dead and out and part of that process of making sure it's dead and out typically is pouring water onto it and if you're near a stream that you could throw your dogs into and you'd be much better off taking water out of the stream and pouring it onto those dogs on the ground and pouring them on to ashes that are left and and making sure that everything is cold and out in the way that I've shown in articles on my site for example is one particular article where I show how to clean up after having a fire but one of the key things to making sure that there is minimal mess to tidy up when you leave is to think ahead and don't throw big pieces of wood on not long before you're leaving because then you're going to be left with half burn big pieces of wood that are a difficult to put out be unsightly and you're just wasting your own effort and getting the wood there in the first place and then putting it out in the second place so think ahead plan ahead the be thoughtful about the uses of resources be thoughtful about how you dispose of those things and I would say don't throw them into water courses but pull water out of the water course and make sure your fire site is dead and out Billy cans versus stainless pots and this is from our pad in Hungary and his question is is there any advantage or disadvantage of using a Billy can compared to other kinds of stainless steel pots of the same capacity but larger diameter for example zebra Billy can 14 centimeter versus 2 Tonka kettle 2.5 I mean the main difference is the shape and I suppose a pot with a larger surface at the bottom will get more heat over the fire and by all the same amount of water in a shorter period does it make any sense it would be a corner for the Billy can are there any more points that could help decide which one to choose or shape doesn't make so much difference which one would you prefer thank you

regards our pod from Hungary I'm good to hear from your iPad and I hope to see you again before too long our pod came and did my intermediate course came all the way from Hungary to the UK to do our intermediate course last year and that's an interesting question i mean we are wedded to billy cans in the bushcraft world and i guess they have a traditional traditional place in wilderness camping and from the outback of Australia to a current day to yeah they're just you know the zebra Billy can has become a classic you know the Billy is classic part of Australian bush law if you like I've seen old Billy's in museums in North America from Hudson's Bay periods and yeah it's just there it's ingrained in the wilderness culture and it has been for a long time but there are many other types of pots and I think broad pots are particularly good on modern camping stoves because the way the heat spreads from the burner and certainly you know the the classic MSR stainless pots that I had and for backpacking for many years we've used with an MSR stove they work very very well together and those and stainless steel pots like the Coleman pots I've got some very nice Coleman pots and it's a tonka pots stainless steel ones a broad a bottom that I've got some sort of bail on them that you can hang them over the fire yeah they work well on both both on stoves and on and on fires and that's a good reason to have them because they were one size fits all in that sense of one shape fits all solution whether you're using a stove or whether you're using a campfire and I think that's not a bad thing means you don't have to have loads and loads of kit for different circumstances but in terms of specifically about the shape otherwise it doesn't seem to make a huge difference over the fire with boiling times I've not perceived anything there you maybe just have to get the shallower the shallower wider pots and get the filled your pot hanger slightly differently because you've got to your height that you're working with is a little bit different but other than that not a huge difference in terms of boil times in terms of packing they make a difference Billy cans fit very nicely inside pockets of rucksacks often but the broader flatter pots typically don't so you end up having to put them in the main compartment of your rucksack when a Billy might fit in the side pocket and that's it that's a consideration potentially

and the other thing is a couple of uses of the pot other than for boiling in terms of cooking stews and it's harder to stir a stew and stop it from sticking to the bottom of a billy can than it is to the bottom of one of the broader ones because you've got more material in contact with the the broader ones and you can get in there and stir more easily in turn turn the contents over and that's one thing that I found but in terms of making billy coffee and all cooking pot coffee if we want to broaden it and I've done it in both Billy cans and the broad shallower pots with the bales and I have to say that the Billy can wings hands down for that coffee dropping technique that we use and doesn't work very well with the broader shallower pots because you don't get that separation of the liquid and the coffee ground is much easier to get a coffee glance so to the bottom of the Billy can which has a taller narrower cylindrical shapes and the broader shallower cylindrical shape so a couple of considerations for me and so typically I'll use a Billy shape unless I'm using specifically using a stove when I will probably choose a broader a broader pot that's that's my personal choice but I'm happy to use either when we do canoe trips in Canada for example we often get all the cooking sets and everything from from an outfitter and typically we get the broader stainless steel pots with the bales and we cook everything in those and do everything in those and we manage fine and but those are my sorts of pros and cons on those two different shapes hopefully that's useful last question about dandelions and this is from Lionel and he's from Portugal and he says I'm quite new to bushcraft and just starting to know some edible plants

everybody talks about dandelion but I have noticed that some plants are very similar to it so my question is is there any plant similar to downed line that could be poisonous or are all of them safe to eat hope it's not too silly a question well that's not a silly question it's all dandelions are very common widespread plants they have a number of uses and for edible purposes and the leaves are edible as a salad and you can make wine from the flowers you can make a sort of sacks coffee from the root and you can even get some carbohydrate content from the roots there are many different types of of dandelion there are a number of many many subspecies and there's amalgamated into one broad species typically and that people talk about when they talk about dandelions but there are many variations on the theme and so I don't know whether it's that that you're saying there are many plants that look like dandelion because they're all subspecies of the same or whether you're saying that there are others that look like dandelion as well because of the flower structure now dandelion is in the Asteraceae family which is a large family of plants which have typically have compound flowers so a thistle is another member of the Asteraceae burdock is another member of the Asteraceae and there and there are many flowers of different colors typically purple and yellow of that type and but there are oranges as well and other colors and there are many that have yellow compound flowers like the like the dandelion type flower but they're there the hawk weeds and the hawk bits as we would call them in English and they have a similar flower but they typically taller plants and none of them are going to poison you but I would be mindful of just from an innate ability from a taste point of view of making sure that you're eating the right one in that circumstance so in terms of eating dandelions you want those nice flat rosettes of leaves that have got that very distinctive to leaf pattern that's where the name comes from don't deleon tooth of the lion in in French so you want it if you turn the leaf on its side it should look like teeth in a jaw and that's what you're looking for so anything that isn't like that and I would be discarding particularly at your stage you should be having a nice flat rosette on the ground they'll have a little tap root and it has a very distinctive dandelion needs the only sort of flat rosette that might be a bit raggy nowhere near as sharp that you would definitely want to avoid is rag Wirt and sneaky Oh Jack a beer and that is it's not going to kill you straight away and in some old books you might even see it referred to as something you can make a key from and but it contains alkaloids which damage the liver and that's something that you don't want to be consuming over time and and that is also in the Asteraceae family but the leaves don't really look like dandelion leaves the overall aspect of the leaf rosettes might be superficially similar to dandelion but as long as you can recognize a dandelion leaf you're not going to make the mistake of confusing one for the other so I'm hoping that is useful to you and make sure you get to know the dandelion leaves very well and then you're not going to mistake them for anything else even if they don't have flowers on and that brings us to the end of the questions for this episode episode 50 of a sport curtly and I can see on the screen it's looking a bit brighter than it actually is in reality now and it's getting a bit dusky now it's just gone sunset here in in Sussex where I am at the moment the birds are singing at the moment and spring is really starting to spring properly down here now and it's a great time to be out I'm out in the woods for 10 days at the moment and for various different reasons and I've got a couple of days in between running one course and some first-aid training that I'm doing and I'm laying on for my team and then we've got some more courses and yeah it's just a nice time to be out everything's happening we've had deer coming through at night and a lot of bird life here with owls last night in the trees just others and there are buzzards here during the day and I heard a goshawk yesterday and we've had woodpeckers and we've got Gold crests up in the trees here and shift Japs and it's just lovely everything's just alive at this time here it's fantastic so I'm going to continue to enjoy my time out and hope you enjoy whatever you're doing at the moment if you're in the northern hemisphere and continue to enjoy the spring if you're in the southern hemisphere hope it's a good autumn and keep those questions coming and Instagram and Twitter have been a bit quiet recently and emails keep them coming in and remember there's always speak pipe as well where you can leave a voice mail question and I can answer them that way as well and if you enjoy this video and then please subscribe to my youtube channel if you're watching this on sit-on on youtube if you're watching this on my blog it signup to the emails because and then i'm going to send you an email notification every time there's new information Lord I'll send you in an email notification and if you listen to this on a podcast and you're not already subscribing via your favorite podcast app iTunes or stitcher or whatever it is you're listening to this on make sure that you subscribe so that you get the next episode of a sport currently they're waiting for you after it's published so thanks for attention thanks for listening and stay safe out there and I'll see you on the next episode of a sport curtly take care [Music]

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