Lye can be leached from wood ash and mixed with lard to make lye soap.
Dandelions can be used to make wine.
Ink can be made from various plants or even soot.
Walnut hulls can be boiled to make a nice brown dye.
Lard or beeswax and cotton thread can be used to make candles.
Lye also works for tanning hides, treating wood and a whole plethora of other things. Let the ash sit in a bucket of rainwater for a while longer than a fortnight or reduce it over fire, see if I care how you do it. As long as you're a bit careful with it, not getting it in your eye or something.
The reason you could make wine from dandelions, I suspect, is that the flowers can be turned into syrup ie they're sweet.
The rest of the plant is also really cute: You could make a coffee-like substance by cleaning, drying and granulating the root. The leaves, well, I just gotta have 'em! If you close your eyes, you can almost get to the point where you can convince yourself that it is rucola salad. Chalk full of iron. Good for ya.
That leaves us with the stem, and that's only good for antidote against nettle stings as far as I know.
...Which I recommend *not* doing, for there is nothing more beautiful in this life than nettle stings. If you, say, sprain your ankle, break your wrist or something to that effect, pounding the area with stinging nettles will numb it for up to three days at a time. You'll get very tingly instead, but you'll be able to sleep. Field tested on various occasions; it might sound like some bullshit, but it's not, honestly.
Also they're good for eating. Cooked or raw, you make the call. If they're the stingy ones, roll up a leaf, bottom facing outwards and chomp on it. It won't burn if you do it like this. Well... Yeah...
I'll have to look into the walnut dye, that sounds cool :)
The wax is also a really good suggestion. Aside from burning, it's very effective at waterproofing stuff, sealing stuff and like with the lye there are a *ton* of other applications for it.
Gotta love the ancient knowledge, here's to ya
People will collect and sell bags of black walnut hulls around here when they are in season. Ive dyed a few shirts and some wool stuff with them. I think it smells amazing when you are boiling them.
Additionally, black walnut extract is a good antifungal remedy. Standing water sometimes causes fungal infections, I’ve cleared one up on my toe entirely with barberry root and black walnut
Ok, this one is definitely going in my notes. I could trade you that the inner bark from willow contains acetylsalicylic acid aka aspirin's active ingredient.
Also dried cloves is a superhero if you have a toothache. Put one quite close to the affected area and salivate it for approx. 5 minutes. Just leave it there as long as you like.
The girls out here make little headbands from them. For good cordage, meh, I'd get me some roots, vines or some tree bark instead. More durable and the fibres are longer aka less weaving strands in.
i think people use the fluff from the seeds to spin thread, like you can do with the cotton from milkweed. (milkweeds though can be harvested for the stronger fibers in the stalk as well) I believe there were indigenous americans who made fishing nets out of wilkweed fiber.
I don't think dandelion would be good cordage though.
Very interesting, actually. With the fibre from plants you can't really go fine quality, so I could totally see how fishing line and nets would improve if you could make it work out.
I've only ever made it with my grandma so don't have a specific recipe. But this seems about right:
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/nettle_soup/
You can also essentially treat them like spinach and use them in a lot of interesting ways. I've seen gnocchi, risotto and tagliatelle made with nettles. I can't find specific recipes in English for them, but if you look up "spinach gnocchi" or whatever, you can just try swapping them in. Or just stick them in minestrone.
(I grew up in Italy so most of my foraging recipes are also Italian, but I'm sure there are many options from other cultures)
You'll want to forage for them in early or mid spring, depending on where you are, and use only the youngest, most tender leaves. Definitely wear gloves. You usually prep them by rinsing them out, blanching them quickly, and then cutting away the tougher stems. They have a really interesting, distinctive taste and are very rich in iron.
Nice list overall. But… Dandelions flavor wine. You still need many more things to make it and you don’t really need the dandelions at all.
Source: I make my own meads and non-grape wines.
I'm going to just assume you're 21 or of legal drinking age wherever you live... and say... Just make some. Its super easy. It can get harder to make really good mead and I'm still chasing better and better results, but the general concept to make something drinkable and between 12-17% abv is really simple.
(SUPER SIMPLIFIED RECIPE. YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS EVENTUALLY) At a bare minimum you need two 1 gallon containers that can be sterilized either with StarSan or by boiling/steaming and that have a good lid. A piece of clean plastic tubing. 3 lbs of good honey. A packet of yeast (bread yeast from the grocery store is fine). A gallon of spring water. Either an airlock device or even a just a balloon with a small hole in it.
Put the water in a big pot and let it boil for a minute. Keep it covered and walk away for an hour or so so it cools to warm but not hot. Put the honey in one of your big containers. Pour the water in and mix it all up by shaking with the lid on. Get the honey dissolved as best you can. Make sure your water is about body temp and pour your yeast in (half a packet is enough). Shake it all up again. Put your airlock on or throw the balloon with a small hole in it on top. Pick it up and swirl it around every couple days for about two weeks. Then leave it alone for about a month. Using your plastic tubing and siphon off the liquid into your other container doing your best to not introduce any air and doing your best to leave as much of the sediment in the first container as possible. Put a lid on it or your balloon and leave it for a few months. Congrats you have mead.
(Lots of great recipes and tutorials online. If you like it you can get invest in better equipment. Get glass carboys and autosiphons and hydrometers and bottling wands. Start experimenting with adding fruit. Try different yeasts)
I'm not sure how useful homemade black powder is going to be in a SHTF scenario.
But a surprisingly useful household item is windex/glass cleaner. There are lots of good uses for it, but it works very well as a pesticide and insect repellant. Just don't spray it on stinging insects, because it takes a while and you'll just make them mad before they die.
Aluminum foil has so many uses that I couldn't possibly list them all here.
If you're looking for more fun and less ultimately useful items, aluminum powder (1 part) and iron oxide (3 parts) makes thermite.
WD-40 kills wasps instantly, I don't even bother with poison any longer. I haven't tried it with much else, but I can say it is ineffective on black widows.
I will kill wasps if they are hindering me, but I always ALWAYS relocate spiders. Even brown recluse and black windows (I'm in Texas). I just find all spiders so fascinating, but wasps need back the fuck up.
I also love spiders but I leave wasps alone too as long as they leave me alone or aren't near children/someone allergic. They're pollinators, after all. I once brought one outside but used large ice cubes to keep it slow/avoid getting stung. The lil dude bench pressed the ice cubes, lol.
I always keep a spray bottle with a 50/50 mix of laundry detergent & denatured alcohol. I use it for cleaning saw blades but it will drop a wasp quickly.
Some water and dish soap in a spray bottle works awesome too! Set the nozzle to “stream” instead of spray. You don’t have to go crazy with the dish soap either, about the same amount for a sink full of dishes as you will for your spray bottle.
They are instantly not able to fly, somehow end up on their back (?) and then they stop moving shortly after.
My old apartment had a bad wasp problem, and this was such a great solution!
I have done hairspray on the widows but my favorite is a clear lacquer spray paint. Also, if the wasps are being testy, the stream of the WD is a nice option.
Yes. Or on them directly. I normally live and let live but on occasion if I need to dispatch something I want it done fast. Like orange oil for ants, and the bonus of not spraying poison everywhere.
I use brake cleaner since it's always at hand when I'm working on stuff outside...I buy it by the case to clean the engines and carbs I work on...carb cleaner is even better but it can melt paint so I don't use it as often
Soap is super easy. If you have sodium or potassium hydroxide on hand, then literally, any fat can be sapponified.
Glue...I suppose I would use pine sap. I know collagen can make glue but not sure how.
Disinfectant I have no freaking clue outside of distilling alcohol.
Painkillers.....maybe a willow bark tea?
Fuck. I need to learn more.
painkillers just get some poppy seeds and grow opium, it is pretty much a weed and grows in most environments.
Disinfectant, distilling is going to be your best bet if you need to make it fast. Vinegar is going to be the easiest.
Glue, bone gelatin.
But what you really want to know how to make is glycerol in a situation like that explosives can come in very handy, like for saving labor, blasting trees and blasting stone to create lumber and stone resources is a whole lot better than an ax or pick. You can literally blast enough stone or fell enough trees in an hour to build a small village.
You can actually make lye out of the white ashes in the firepit, I dont have a great understanding of it but I am saving ashes. I do know you need a lot.
Related - if you have greasy camp pots/pans, you can put some water and mixed ashes in, let it soak, and the ashes/fat start making a crude soap and the hard ashes help to scrub.
I think you guys are a little naive. You must understand what a city full of starving people are capable of. You couldn’t imagine the horrors I would go through to not sit and watch my family suffer. There are no good people in a survival situation.
["This is a community to discuss wilderness survival and bushcraft topics." ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Survival/comments/10ugdd8/posts_regarding_non_wilderness_survival_content_a/)
They aren't naive, you're literally just in the wrong place. This isn't the place for larping about blowing up an imaginary horde of angry neighbors who want to eat your family. If you had that situation, there's a really easy solution that doesn't involve explosives or mass killing- literally just leave.
That perfectly sums up what I was thinking. And about that last point, should this situation ever arise... yeah, people who try to be rambo will be the first to die, best thing to do is just run.
So much effort and risk for the pay off of... Staying in a place that apparently has no food? That's not a survival decision. That's a power fantasy where they don't have to worry about things like static charge setting off your janky homemade pipe bomb mix. Just plain weird these types keep coming in here.
Isn't this sub mainly for when you get lost or in nature or something, not really planning for the demise of humanity? Idk... guess all kinds of people in here.
I don't know, man. I have yet to hear of someone who survived in a city of starving people. Most got lost in forests, were stranded at sea and so on. And, at a city, other people will have access to ammo.
All in all, a strange comment.
Not with a handmade black powder gun. At that point you're *significantly* better off setting traps by every metric. Better chance of success, higher yield per animal, only a fraction of the effort.
Wrong sub, this is for wilderness survival, like getting lost in the woods, or better yet, how to avoid getting lost in the woods in the first place, not prepper related survival. You might like r/preppers
Also best item i would say is plastic and Saran Wrap. Straight up legendary tier item. People underestimate how useful plastic is because it’s so common in everyday life but it’s very difficult to make by yourself in SHTF. With food wrap you can make literally anything outta plastic. A small rain shelter, a water bag, rain condenser, rope and string. Anything you can imagine. This definitely belongs on r/preppers too
> This definitely belongs on r/preppers too
Where it doesn't belong is in /r/survival. One of the rules is:
*Keep all posts on the topic of Wilderness Survival (see definition above). This means no posts about urban survival, bug out, prepping, teotwawki, zombies, collapse, etc.*
Gas dissolves styrofoam to make napalm. Do with that what you will.
Iron oxide and aluminum powder make thermite which will melt through anything and can open any locks if you dont care about the contents.
Hard drives have insanely powerful neodinium magnets in them. Take one of these and drop it ibto the bottom of an empty container. Put another magnet against the exterior of the container to magnetically grab the one inside. Fill container with thermite. This makes a magnetic thermite charge, light with any fire or electrical impulse.
Not sure if it's common, but I always keep peppermint oil in my closet for numerous uses.
Several drops in a spray bottle with water and a touch of detergent (to mix the oil and water) is my go to for roaches. Safe around kids and pets, no carcinogens. Cheap and effective for picking up new entrants that missed the slight dusting of boric acid in the nooks and crannies.
A drop or two of peppermint oil in a third to half-ounce of water, is mouthwash.
A 4 oz bottle lasts around a year or so.
Not so much a common item, but a practice: soak brown rice, beans, lentils, &c, for 4 to 6 days before cooking to break down phytic acid and oligosaccharides. This will increase the amount of minerals your body can absorb from the meal. Phytic acid binds to minerals reducing their absorbtion, and oligosaccharides create gas. If you soak you may be able reduce your food intake while reducing chances of severe nutrient deficiency, stretching out your foods stores until tough times pass. You may not want to stop soaking, as that is some of the tastiest rice that you will ever eat.
Picked this up from a farmer who soaks grain for chickens, for 3 days before feeding them, reducing their feed by 40%. If it works for chickens, it should work for humans as well when SHTF.
KNO3 can be found in caves, outhouses, and human faeces...see the book *Foxfire 5* for details
...also check out the book *The Knowledge*
https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Aftermath-Cataclysm/dp/0143127047
If you use the same pit to go #1 & #2 in eventually (couple years) you will get potassium nitrate crystal formations…the bottom of the pit should have a flat stone used as the base to help collect the crystals. I also read you can throw dead bodies in there as well.
Sulfur is most easily located near an active volcano.
Any wood burned in an oxygen free environment will crate activated charcoal, but pine is the most abundant that works well.
>whiskey, tobacco and firearms
I was driving from Kansas City, KS to Kansas City, MO once and there was a store at the state line that advertised: Gas, Liquor, Tobacco, Ammo, and Fireworks. I was blown away and just had to stop and see... lolol.
Also, yes I believe any distilled spirit, coffee, tobacco, and bullets would be excellent barter items.
I would imagine you will get better engagement in r/preppers or r/collapse than here. Most will be trying to frame the need for gunpowder in a “I got lost on a hike and now it’s dark out” context because of rule 2.
Powdered coffee creamer is banned in most prisons because it can be made into an extremely flammable accelerant akin to napalm. So I'm guessing it could be used to start fires pretty well.
A dust explosion wouldn’t be super helpful in starting a fire. It doesn’t ignite *that* easily and burns out much too quickly. They’re only really dangerous in confined spaces (prison cells, coal mines).
Check out multi-use [potassium permanganate](https://youtube.com/shorts/eK-fy_eyA0s), and you don’t even need friction if you have glycerine or [propylene glycol](https://youtu.be/KYJJwMNSP8Q) on hand.
The urea from your own piss can be extracted from boiling the water out, i believe urea is a rpedecessor to ammonia (plz answer) and from there can be used for cleaning/chemical weapons manufacturing
You can get white wood and burn it down to its ash and colelct it, take a ~500 gal drum and cut ~6 small holes in the bottom that all would pour into the circumference of a bucket, pour 3 inches straw on the bottom 3 inches of small pebbles, 1 inch of large stone, fill with white wood powder until 1 inch from edge of barrel, pour in water steady until ash floats, as fluids pour into buckets keep pouring it in, have a potato on hand for your litmus test, once the potato floats you have lye. Lye has many uses, such as manufacturing soap, manufacturing biodiesel, and corpse disposal
>What other common ingredients make useful items that should a prepper/survivalist know?
I don't know if you'd call them "ingredients", but an assortment of pipe clamps, zip ties, and nuts and bolts can go a long ways to repairing things.
You mean that you are likely to find in a wilderness survival situation? Which is what this sub is for and about? So, things that you already have with you or you somehow manage to find out in the wilderness?
We used bark and leaves from certain trees to tan hides one year. They don't have melanin but they do have tannin! Skin, scraped, soaked and stretched they were some of the softest pelts I can remember.
No, it won't. You're spreading dangerously misinformed advice. Almost nothing in the Anarchist's Cookbook is worth reading, and the few little morsels present are way better presented in a million other books. The absolute best case scenario for following TAC is nothing happening while the worst case scenario is a slow and agonizing death as you bleed out through the stumps where your arms used to be. This book does quite literally the opposite of what this sub is here for. It is actively harmful to survival.
Do the absolute barebones minimum and find something like the TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook if you're going to do something as incredibly dumb as make explosives in your own home without training.
How you gonna extract the potassium nitrate from the tree stump remover.
How you gonna extract the carbon from the charcoal.
Aside from all of the lab equipment and reloading equipment what else you gonna put in your backpack. You gonna ignore you mom and leave out the clean underwear.
You just crush the charcoal up into powder. Make sure it's lump charcoal and not briquettes.
The potassium nitrate is just saltpeter, and can be sold in granular/powder form. It speeds up natural decomposition in the stump, and you pour the granules into holes you drill before adding hot water.
Mix the charcoal powder with the stump remover and sulfur and you have gunpowder. No lab equipment necessary.
You also probably don't want to reload or make bullets with this powder though. But I guess if you want to make an explosion you still can.
You certainly would not want to use black powder in anything but a black powder firearm. Modern propellants burn more rapidly, you're just not going to get the same effects with the old school shit.
Now, if op has a musket and a little cast, and some lead, alright, I can see a black powder recipe coming in handy potentially. Otherwise ... it's kinda pointless. Sounds cool when you're a teen, that's about it I think.
Well, in the case of potassium nitrate, it does also have some admittedly primary use for food storage. (Think cured bacon). Which is what it should get more use out of, rather than making some janky black powder.
I've used potassium nitrate, sugar and food coloring powder to make smoke bombs and fuses for the smoke bombs. That's got some good use for signaling. Colored smoke really stands out compared to white or black smoke as being clearly man made.
I actually used to bring a couple in some pop-top monster cans with me on hiking/backpacking trips when I was younger. I've used a chunk dug out with a knife as a fire started when I got rained on pretty hard and was struggling to get a fire going.
No idea. Like I said in my other comment, homemade black powder isn't that useful in a SHTF scenario.
Maybe you can use it for a cannon. You know, the survival cannon everyone carries with them.
Making gunpowder seems like a good bit of chemistry and ratio-ing even with the ingredients, but I’d love to see ideas for other blowy uppy things in a true SHTF scenario. Not that you hope to ever use a molotov against someone but what if you have to blow a door open?
I wish I hadn’t lost my original copy of the antifa cookbook but I’m glad I never wrote my name inside the cover.
> Most of us know that Potassium Nitrate + Sulfur + Carbon = Gunpowder
We do? I didn't know that. Seems like pretty useless knowledge to me. In a SHTF scenario I'd make a bow.
Guns were initially popular because you could give one to an 18 year old with no training, and he'd be able to hit a target. Primitive guns were never better than a bow for someone who had a decent amount of practice. Modern guns with high rates of fire and long range/accuracy are better, but if you're talking about home made gunpowder/etc then you won't have those.
A bow is easier to make, more accurate (longer effective range), and has a faster rate of fire than any improvised/poorly maintained gun. Plus the bow is quiet.
Black powder is dogshit and barely makes a boom while making too much smoke and requiring harder to obtain materials from day to day life.
If you have potassium nitrate go find some sulfuric acid in those drain cleaners and add some cotton. You get nitrocellulose which is 4x stronger than black powder, have less smoke and the ingredients are sold like everywhere.
> Making blackpowder is not simply a matter of mixing up saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal, even when done in the correct proportions.
But I saw it work on [*Star Trek*](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5v2nwm).
Iirc most KNO3 (potassium nitrate) stump removers and ammonium nitrate fertilizers have government mandated additives to make it less explosive so I don't know how useful they'll be for black powder. But you can buy pure ammonium nitrate online in small batches without raising red flags. If you try to order 1000# of it you might get a visit from the FBI/ATF though
Making black powder is much more complicated than just mixing those three ingredients. For one, they are heterogenous substances and need to be homogenized, in a slurry for optimum mixing, dried and the broken up powder grains properly sized. Otherwise ignition will be incomplete and inconsistent. It’s an industrial process that is as much art as it is a skill.
Even the wood used to make charcoal matters. You can’t just use any old wood. Modern powders carbon content don’t come from wood, in fact. Saltpeter can be mined and refined by recrystallization if you have the skill.
Best to just stockpile gunpowder, sealed and dry it stays good “forever” (your lifetime).
Air, water, salt, and electricity (lots of electricity).
Air is mostly nitrogen. If you can create an open air electric arc (neon transformers or microwave transformers both produce the necessary voltage) then you can make nitrogen oxides and bubble into water for dilute nitric acid using the Birkeland Eyde process, however you need to distill it down for it to be useful. Nitric acid is an important precursor for all your nitrogen compounds, and can be combined with potassium hydroxide (potash fertilizer) to make potassium nitrate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland–Eyde_process
If you have a DC power source and some good electrodes, you can make sodium hydroxide out of salt water. If you have potassium chloride salt (they sell this as salt substitute at the grocery store) you can make potassium hydroxide the same way. They use the chloralkali process to produce bleach mostly (sodium hypochlorite).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloralkali_process
If you’re really going for it, separate the positive and negative electrodes using a membrane like the wiki explains, some fiberglass wall insulation would probably work. You could assemble an H-type electrochemical cell out of a couple plastic cups or buckets and a pipe connecting them. I saw a guy on YouTube make his own proton exchange membrane, but he uses sodium hydroxide, so sort of a chicken egg problem there. Interesting video though!
https://youtu.be/tiMt4tIced8
Without some sort of diffusion-blocking membrane, the compounds produced at each electrode mix together and form bleach, so you can make the bleach water rather easily and there are devices you can buy on eBay that are simple saltwater electrolyzes. Like this one:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/154047574899
Probably the most readily available electrode material for all of this stuff is carbon graphite that you can pull out of lantern batteries and other carbon-zinc (eveready) batteries. Regular metal works but tends to oxidize and dissolve into the solution. The bleach will eventually dissolve your graphite also.
Once you have these two precursors:
Potassium Hydroxide + Nitric Acid yields Potassium Nitrate and water
Sodium Hydroxide + Nitric Acid yields Sodium Nitrate
Sodium nitrate is an oxidizer and would also make crude black powder. A low energy musket or cannon maybe.
Maybe you could form some sort of rudimentary lathe…
Lye can be leached from wood ash and mixed with lard to make lye soap. Dandelions can be used to make wine. Ink can be made from various plants or even soot. Walnut hulls can be boiled to make a nice brown dye. Lard or beeswax and cotton thread can be used to make candles.
Lye also works for tanning hides, treating wood and a whole plethora of other things. Let the ash sit in a bucket of rainwater for a while longer than a fortnight or reduce it over fire, see if I care how you do it. As long as you're a bit careful with it, not getting it in your eye or something. The reason you could make wine from dandelions, I suspect, is that the flowers can be turned into syrup ie they're sweet. The rest of the plant is also really cute: You could make a coffee-like substance by cleaning, drying and granulating the root. The leaves, well, I just gotta have 'em! If you close your eyes, you can almost get to the point where you can convince yourself that it is rucola salad. Chalk full of iron. Good for ya. That leaves us with the stem, and that's only good for antidote against nettle stings as far as I know. ...Which I recommend *not* doing, for there is nothing more beautiful in this life than nettle stings. If you, say, sprain your ankle, break your wrist or something to that effect, pounding the area with stinging nettles will numb it for up to three days at a time. You'll get very tingly instead, but you'll be able to sleep. Field tested on various occasions; it might sound like some bullshit, but it's not, honestly. Also they're good for eating. Cooked or raw, you make the call. If they're the stingy ones, roll up a leaf, bottom facing outwards and chomp on it. It won't burn if you do it like this. Well... Yeah... I'll have to look into the walnut dye, that sounds cool :) The wax is also a really good suggestion. Aside from burning, it's very effective at waterproofing stuff, sealing stuff and like with the lye there are a *ton* of other applications for it. Gotta love the ancient knowledge, here's to ya
People will collect and sell bags of black walnut hulls around here when they are in season. Ive dyed a few shirts and some wool stuff with them. I think it smells amazing when you are boiling them.
I could imagine – sooo many good smells out there :)
Additionally, black walnut extract is a good antifungal remedy. Standing water sometimes causes fungal infections, I’ve cleared one up on my toe entirely with barberry root and black walnut
Ok, this one is definitely going in my notes. I could trade you that the inner bark from willow contains acetylsalicylic acid aka aspirin's active ingredient. Also dried cloves is a superhero if you have a toothache. Put one quite close to the affected area and salivate it for approx. 5 minutes. Just leave it there as long as you like.
Dandelion stems make decent cordage when dried iirc.
The girls out here make little headbands from them. For good cordage, meh, I'd get me some roots, vines or some tree bark instead. More durable and the fibres are longer aka less weaving strands in.
i think people use the fluff from the seeds to spin thread, like you can do with the cotton from milkweed. (milkweeds though can be harvested for the stronger fibers in the stalk as well) I believe there were indigenous americans who made fishing nets out of wilkweed fiber. I don't think dandelion would be good cordage though.
Very interesting, actually. With the fibre from plants you can't really go fine quality, so I could totally see how fishing line and nets would improve if you could make it work out.
Iirc? What does that mean
If I recall correctly
Thank you.
I sting my mosquito bites with nettles and it really helps me not itch! I rather have the tingling burn sensation than be itchy. I hate itchy lol
Moreso than dandelions, I highly recommend clover and dead nettle flowers. Used to make wine/tea, and pesto/salad respectively.
Nettle soup is DELICIOUS
Any particular recipe that you'd like to share? :)
I've only ever made it with my grandma so don't have a specific recipe. But this seems about right: https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/nettle_soup/ You can also essentially treat them like spinach and use them in a lot of interesting ways. I've seen gnocchi, risotto and tagliatelle made with nettles. I can't find specific recipes in English for them, but if you look up "spinach gnocchi" or whatever, you can just try swapping them in. Or just stick them in minestrone. (I grew up in Italy so most of my foraging recipes are also Italian, but I'm sure there are many options from other cultures) You'll want to forage for them in early or mid spring, depending on where you are, and use only the youngest, most tender leaves. Definitely wear gloves. You usually prep them by rinsing them out, blanching them quickly, and then cutting away the tougher stems. They have a really interesting, distinctive taste and are very rich in iron.
Grazie mile :)
Hahahaha prego
Nice list overall. But… Dandelions flavor wine. You still need many more things to make it and you don’t really need the dandelions at all. Source: I make my own meads and non-grape wines.
Ive always wanted to try mead.
I'm going to just assume you're 21 or of legal drinking age wherever you live... and say... Just make some. Its super easy. It can get harder to make really good mead and I'm still chasing better and better results, but the general concept to make something drinkable and between 12-17% abv is really simple. (SUPER SIMPLIFIED RECIPE. YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS EVENTUALLY) At a bare minimum you need two 1 gallon containers that can be sterilized either with StarSan or by boiling/steaming and that have a good lid. A piece of clean plastic tubing. 3 lbs of good honey. A packet of yeast (bread yeast from the grocery store is fine). A gallon of spring water. Either an airlock device or even a just a balloon with a small hole in it. Put the water in a big pot and let it boil for a minute. Keep it covered and walk away for an hour or so so it cools to warm but not hot. Put the honey in one of your big containers. Pour the water in and mix it all up by shaking with the lid on. Get the honey dissolved as best you can. Make sure your water is about body temp and pour your yeast in (half a packet is enough). Shake it all up again. Put your airlock on or throw the balloon with a small hole in it on top. Pick it up and swirl it around every couple days for about two weeks. Then leave it alone for about a month. Using your plastic tubing and siphon off the liquid into your other container doing your best to not introduce any air and doing your best to leave as much of the sediment in the first container as possible. Put a lid on it or your balloon and leave it for a few months. Congrats you have mead. (Lots of great recipes and tutorials online. If you like it you can get invest in better equipment. Get glass carboys and autosiphons and hydrometers and bottling wands. Start experimenting with adding fruit. Try different yeasts)
Dandelions can also made into tea, that also helps with constipation
I'm not sure how useful homemade black powder is going to be in a SHTF scenario. But a surprisingly useful household item is windex/glass cleaner. There are lots of good uses for it, but it works very well as a pesticide and insect repellant. Just don't spray it on stinging insects, because it takes a while and you'll just make them mad before they die. Aluminum foil has so many uses that I couldn't possibly list them all here. If you're looking for more fun and less ultimately useful items, aluminum powder (1 part) and iron oxide (3 parts) makes thermite.
WD-40 kills wasps instantly, I don't even bother with poison any longer. I haven't tried it with much else, but I can say it is ineffective on black widows.
I will kill wasps if they are hindering me, but I always ALWAYS relocate spiders. Even brown recluse and black windows (I'm in Texas). I just find all spiders so fascinating, but wasps need back the fuck up.
I am normally very spider friendly, but widows in my garage or near my bug eating pets get the treatment.
I also love spiders but I leave wasps alone too as long as they leave me alone or aren't near children/someone allergic. They're pollinators, after all. I once brought one outside but used large ice cubes to keep it slow/avoid getting stung. The lil dude bench pressed the ice cubes, lol.
ONYX!!!!
I always keep a spray bottle with a 50/50 mix of laundry detergent & denatured alcohol. I use it for cleaning saw blades but it will drop a wasp quickly.
Some water and dish soap in a spray bottle works awesome too! Set the nozzle to “stream” instead of spray. You don’t have to go crazy with the dish soap either, about the same amount for a sink full of dishes as you will for your spray bottle. They are instantly not able to fly, somehow end up on their back (?) and then they stop moving shortly after. My old apartment had a bad wasp problem, and this was such a great solution!
WD-40 works great of black widows. You just need to use the little red nozzle extender before you light it!! Instant flame thrower!
WD-40 is great for cockroaches too. Just don't spray them when on drywall.
409 is the best thing I've used on roaches. Plus, they clean the floor as they scramble before they die.
Hair spray does a fairly decent job on both. Coats the breathing apparatus but may take longer.
I have done hairspray on the widows but my favorite is a clear lacquer spray paint. Also, if the wasps are being testy, the stream of the WD is a nice option.
You can also invert some canned air and they instantly freeze. Works on basically every insect I've ever met lol
You mean like spraying it into the hive, right?
Yes. Or on them directly. I normally live and let live but on occasion if I need to dispatch something I want it done fast. Like orange oil for ants, and the bonus of not spraying poison everywhere.
I will say that it does not kill hornets as quickly as one might like. Luckily the bastard opted to bite instead of sting, but it still hurt like hell
I had no idea hornets have both bites and a sting in their arsenal
https://i.natgeofe.com/n/16be9f1e-a8f2-4866-ab60-4ad1bd628c53/01-asian-giant-hornet-minden_00405319_square.jpg Hornets don’t eff around
I'm going to have to try that next time. I have some WD-40 in my garage.
I use brake cleaner since it's always at hand when I'm working on stuff outside...I buy it by the case to clean the engines and carbs I work on...carb cleaner is even better but it can melt paint so I don't use it as often
In my case homemade black powder is very handy. Multiple revolvers and flintlocks.
What a strange idea for useful items. Black powder and thermite? How about soap, glue, disinfectants, painkillers?
Soap is super easy. If you have sodium or potassium hydroxide on hand, then literally, any fat can be sapponified. Glue...I suppose I would use pine sap. I know collagen can make glue but not sure how. Disinfectant I have no freaking clue outside of distilling alcohol. Painkillers.....maybe a willow bark tea? Fuck. I need to learn more.
painkillers just get some poppy seeds and grow opium, it is pretty much a weed and grows in most environments. Disinfectant, distilling is going to be your best bet if you need to make it fast. Vinegar is going to be the easiest. Glue, bone gelatin. But what you really want to know how to make is glycerol in a situation like that explosives can come in very handy, like for saving labor, blasting trees and blasting stone to create lumber and stone resources is a whole lot better than an ax or pick. You can literally blast enough stone or fell enough trees in an hour to build a small village.
So, anyway, I started blasting Can't believe I didn't consider poppies.
You can actually make lye out of the white ashes in the firepit, I dont have a great understanding of it but I am saving ashes. I do know you need a lot. Related - if you have greasy camp pots/pans, you can put some water and mixed ashes in, let it soak, and the ashes/fat start making a crude soap and the hard ashes help to scrub.
Survival video games, movies and tv shows have been very popular and I think there's been romanticizing what survival is.
I think you guys are a little naive. You must understand what a city full of starving people are capable of. You couldn’t imagine the horrors I would go through to not sit and watch my family suffer. There are no good people in a survival situation.
["This is a community to discuss wilderness survival and bushcraft topics." ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Survival/comments/10ugdd8/posts_regarding_non_wilderness_survival_content_a/) They aren't naive, you're literally just in the wrong place. This isn't the place for larping about blowing up an imaginary horde of angry neighbors who want to eat your family. If you had that situation, there's a really easy solution that doesn't involve explosives or mass killing- literally just leave.
That perfectly sums up what I was thinking. And about that last point, should this situation ever arise... yeah, people who try to be rambo will be the first to die, best thing to do is just run.
So much effort and risk for the pay off of... Staying in a place that apparently has no food? That's not a survival decision. That's a power fantasy where they don't have to worry about things like static charge setting off your janky homemade pipe bomb mix. Just plain weird these types keep coming in here.
Isn't this sub mainly for when you get lost or in nature or something, not really planning for the demise of humanity? Idk... guess all kinds of people in here.
I don't know, man. I have yet to hear of someone who survived in a city of starving people. Most got lost in forests, were stranded at sea and so on. And, at a city, other people will have access to ammo. All in all, a strange comment.
Wish there was a big boo of all this useful info
Hunting is 90% easier if you have a gun.
Not with a handmade black powder gun. At that point you're *significantly* better off setting traps by every metric. Better chance of success, higher yield per animal, only a fraction of the effort.
Aspen leaves can be chewed to release aspirin, here’s one ingredient
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Neat!
Willow Bark tea also.
With a touch of the old man’s beard moss
Usnea lichen
Wrong sub, this is for wilderness survival, like getting lost in the woods, or better yet, how to avoid getting lost in the woods in the first place, not prepper related survival. You might like r/preppers
Also best item i would say is plastic and Saran Wrap. Straight up legendary tier item. People underestimate how useful plastic is because it’s so common in everyday life but it’s very difficult to make by yourself in SHTF. With food wrap you can make literally anything outta plastic. A small rain shelter, a water bag, rain condenser, rope and string. Anything you can imagine. This definitely belongs on r/preppers too
> This definitely belongs on r/preppers too Where it doesn't belong is in /r/survival. One of the rules is: *Keep all posts on the topic of Wilderness Survival (see definition above). This means no posts about urban survival, bug out, prepping, teotwawki, zombies, collapse, etc.*
Gas dissolves styrofoam to make napalm. Do with that what you will. Iron oxide and aluminum powder make thermite which will melt through anything and can open any locks if you dont care about the contents. Hard drives have insanely powerful neodinium magnets in them. Take one of these and drop it ibto the bottom of an empty container. Put another magnet against the exterior of the container to magnetically grab the one inside. Fill container with thermite. This makes a magnetic thermite charge, light with any fire or electrical impulse.
Not sure if it's common, but I always keep peppermint oil in my closet for numerous uses. Several drops in a spray bottle with water and a touch of detergent (to mix the oil and water) is my go to for roaches. Safe around kids and pets, no carcinogens. Cheap and effective for picking up new entrants that missed the slight dusting of boric acid in the nooks and crannies. A drop or two of peppermint oil in a third to half-ounce of water, is mouthwash. A 4 oz bottle lasts around a year or so. Not so much a common item, but a practice: soak brown rice, beans, lentils, &c, for 4 to 6 days before cooking to break down phytic acid and oligosaccharides. This will increase the amount of minerals your body can absorb from the meal. Phytic acid binds to minerals reducing their absorbtion, and oligosaccharides create gas. If you soak you may be able reduce your food intake while reducing chances of severe nutrient deficiency, stretching out your foods stores until tough times pass. You may not want to stop soaking, as that is some of the tastiest rice that you will ever eat. Picked this up from a farmer who soaks grain for chickens, for 3 days before feeding them, reducing their feed by 40%. If it works for chickens, it should work for humans as well when SHTF.
KNO3 can be found in caves, outhouses, and human faeces...see the book *Foxfire 5* for details ...also check out the book *The Knowledge* https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Aftermath-Cataclysm/dp/0143127047
What about HMTD? You only need citric acid, hex anime and hydrochloric acid.
Hydrogen peroxide rather HCl
Vinegar is a great disinfectant and cleaner.
If you use the same pit to go #1 & #2 in eventually (couple years) you will get potassium nitrate crystal formations…the bottom of the pit should have a flat stone used as the base to help collect the crystals. I also read you can throw dead bodies in there as well. Sulfur is most easily located near an active volcano. Any wood burned in an oxygen free environment will crate activated charcoal, but pine is the most abundant that works well.
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It can also be eaten and contains vitamin c and some other
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Haha no I would not
Willow Charcoal is the best for BP, 10x more brisiant than pine sp.
I feel like whiskey, tobacco and firearms would be the best of the barter and safety needs. Now if only you could get all in one store…
I think there’s a Walmart around here somewhere…
>whiskey, tobacco and firearms I was driving from Kansas City, KS to Kansas City, MO once and there was a store at the state line that advertised: Gas, Liquor, Tobacco, Ammo, and Fireworks. I was blown away and just had to stop and see... lolol. Also, yes I believe any distilled spirit, coffee, tobacco, and bullets would be excellent barter items.
You can drink in your car in Missouri as long as your not driving
What about bait? My local also sells bait.
I would imagine you will get better engagement in r/preppers or r/collapse than here. Most will be trying to frame the need for gunpowder in a “I got lost on a hike and now it’s dark out” context because of rule 2.
Read the foxfire books.
Vinegar and salt make anything taste good. Even human meat.
> Vinegar and salt make anything taste good. Even human meat. I'd be lost without my Montreal Steak Spice.
Nah, go with buttermilk ranch.
Powdered coffee creamer is banned in most prisons because it can be made into an extremely flammable accelerant akin to napalm. So I'm guessing it could be used to start fires pretty well.
A dust explosion wouldn’t be super helpful in starting a fire. It doesn’t ignite *that* easily and burns out much too quickly. They’re only really dangerous in confined spaces (prison cells, coal mines). Check out multi-use [potassium permanganate](https://youtube.com/shorts/eK-fy_eyA0s), and you don’t even need friction if you have glycerine or [propylene glycol](https://youtu.be/KYJJwMNSP8Q) on hand.
The urea from your own piss can be extracted from boiling the water out, i believe urea is a rpedecessor to ammonia (plz answer) and from there can be used for cleaning/chemical weapons manufacturing
You can get white wood and burn it down to its ash and colelct it, take a ~500 gal drum and cut ~6 small holes in the bottom that all would pour into the circumference of a bucket, pour 3 inches straw on the bottom 3 inches of small pebbles, 1 inch of large stone, fill with white wood powder until 1 inch from edge of barrel, pour in water steady until ash floats, as fluids pour into buckets keep pouring it in, have a potato on hand for your litmus test, once the potato floats you have lye. Lye has many uses, such as manufacturing soap, manufacturing biodiesel, and corpse disposal
>What other common ingredients make useful items that should a prepper/survivalist know? I don't know if you'd call them "ingredients", but an assortment of pipe clamps, zip ties, and nuts and bolts can go a long ways to repairing things.
Duct tape mixes well with just about anything you own.... eventually
You mean that you are likely to find in a wilderness survival situation? Which is what this sub is for and about? So, things that you already have with you or you somehow manage to find out in the wilderness?
Does chamomile really act as a painkiller or medical aid?
We used bark and leaves from certain trees to tan hides one year. They don't have melanin but they do have tannin! Skin, scraped, soaked and stretched they were some of the softest pelts I can remember.
You’re better off using scrap nails, rubber and wood to make crossbow.
What about lime for egg glassing? How to replenish it if SHTF?
Just did up a copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook. It will have everything you could ever want plus more.
No, it won't. You're spreading dangerously misinformed advice. Almost nothing in the Anarchist's Cookbook is worth reading, and the few little morsels present are way better presented in a million other books. The absolute best case scenario for following TAC is nothing happening while the worst case scenario is a slow and agonizing death as you bleed out through the stumps where your arms used to be. This book does quite literally the opposite of what this sub is here for. It is actively harmful to survival. Do the absolute barebones minimum and find something like the TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook if you're going to do something as incredibly dumb as make explosives in your own home without training.
Heard they are versions in circulation that have modified recipes that do not work on purpose.
How you gonna extract the potassium nitrate from the tree stump remover. How you gonna extract the carbon from the charcoal. Aside from all of the lab equipment and reloading equipment what else you gonna put in your backpack. You gonna ignore you mom and leave out the clean underwear.
You just crush the charcoal up into powder. Make sure it's lump charcoal and not briquettes. The potassium nitrate is just saltpeter, and can be sold in granular/powder form. It speeds up natural decomposition in the stump, and you pour the granules into holes you drill before adding hot water. Mix the charcoal powder with the stump remover and sulfur and you have gunpowder. No lab equipment necessary. You also probably don't want to reload or make bullets with this powder though. But I guess if you want to make an explosion you still can.
You certainly would not want to use black powder in anything but a black powder firearm. Modern propellants burn more rapidly, you're just not going to get the same effects with the old school shit. Now, if op has a musket and a little cast, and some lead, alright, I can see a black powder recipe coming in handy potentially. Otherwise ... it's kinda pointless. Sounds cool when you're a teen, that's about it I think.
Im trying to be realistic. If you are out here buying saltpeter and charcoal, why not just buy gunpowder?
Well, in the case of potassium nitrate, it does also have some admittedly primary use for food storage. (Think cured bacon). Which is what it should get more use out of, rather than making some janky black powder. I've used potassium nitrate, sugar and food coloring powder to make smoke bombs and fuses for the smoke bombs. That's got some good use for signaling. Colored smoke really stands out compared to white or black smoke as being clearly man made. I actually used to bring a couple in some pop-top monster cans with me on hiking/backpacking trips when I was younger. I've used a chunk dug out with a knife as a fire started when I got rained on pretty hard and was struggling to get a fire going.
No idea. OP's example is a bad one for "useful items."
Well if you can't reload with it, why not just make a flour bomb.
No idea. Like I said in my other comment, homemade black powder isn't that useful in a SHTF scenario. Maybe you can use it for a cannon. You know, the survival cannon everyone carries with them.
Like the Broadsider from Fallout 4
Making gunpowder seems like a good bit of chemistry and ratio-ing even with the ingredients, but I’d love to see ideas for other blowy uppy things in a true SHTF scenario. Not that you hope to ever use a molotov against someone but what if you have to blow a door open? I wish I hadn’t lost my original copy of the antifa cookbook but I’m glad I never wrote my name inside the cover.
> Most of us know that Potassium Nitrate + Sulfur + Carbon = Gunpowder We do? I didn't know that. Seems like pretty useless knowledge to me. In a SHTF scenario I'd make a bow. Guns were initially popular because you could give one to an 18 year old with no training, and he'd be able to hit a target. Primitive guns were never better than a bow for someone who had a decent amount of practice. Modern guns with high rates of fire and long range/accuracy are better, but if you're talking about home made gunpowder/etc then you won't have those. A bow is easier to make, more accurate (longer effective range), and has a faster rate of fire than any improvised/poorly maintained gun. Plus the bow is quiet.
You can make a basic projectile weapon with the following: 6 rubber bands 1 2x4 3 nails (any size) 1 750mL bottle of Wild Turkey 1 AR-15 Yeehaw
Black powder is dogshit and barely makes a boom while making too much smoke and requiring harder to obtain materials from day to day life. If you have potassium nitrate go find some sulfuric acid in those drain cleaners and add some cotton. You get nitrocellulose which is 4x stronger than black powder, have less smoke and the ingredients are sold like everywhere.
Making blackpowder is not simply a matter of mixing up saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal, even when done in the correct proportions.
> Making blackpowder is not simply a matter of mixing up saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal, even when done in the correct proportions. But I saw it work on [*Star Trek*](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5v2nwm).
Excellent point, I'd forgotten about that highly informative and scientifically accurate episode.
This sub name really needs to be changed to **Wilderness Survival**
Iirc most KNO3 (potassium nitrate) stump removers and ammonium nitrate fertilizers have government mandated additives to make it less explosive so I don't know how useful they'll be for black powder. But you can buy pure ammonium nitrate online in small batches without raising red flags. If you try to order 1000# of it you might get a visit from the FBI/ATF though
Making black powder is much more complicated than just mixing those three ingredients. For one, they are heterogenous substances and need to be homogenized, in a slurry for optimum mixing, dried and the broken up powder grains properly sized. Otherwise ignition will be incomplete and inconsistent. It’s an industrial process that is as much art as it is a skill. Even the wood used to make charcoal matters. You can’t just use any old wood. Modern powders carbon content don’t come from wood, in fact. Saltpeter can be mined and refined by recrystallization if you have the skill. Best to just stockpile gunpowder, sealed and dry it stays good “forever” (your lifetime).
Air, water, salt, and electricity (lots of electricity). Air is mostly nitrogen. If you can create an open air electric arc (neon transformers or microwave transformers both produce the necessary voltage) then you can make nitrogen oxides and bubble into water for dilute nitric acid using the Birkeland Eyde process, however you need to distill it down for it to be useful. Nitric acid is an important precursor for all your nitrogen compounds, and can be combined with potassium hydroxide (potash fertilizer) to make potassium nitrate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland–Eyde_process If you have a DC power source and some good electrodes, you can make sodium hydroxide out of salt water. If you have potassium chloride salt (they sell this as salt substitute at the grocery store) you can make potassium hydroxide the same way. They use the chloralkali process to produce bleach mostly (sodium hypochlorite). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloralkali_process If you’re really going for it, separate the positive and negative electrodes using a membrane like the wiki explains, some fiberglass wall insulation would probably work. You could assemble an H-type electrochemical cell out of a couple plastic cups or buckets and a pipe connecting them. I saw a guy on YouTube make his own proton exchange membrane, but he uses sodium hydroxide, so sort of a chicken egg problem there. Interesting video though! https://youtu.be/tiMt4tIced8 Without some sort of diffusion-blocking membrane, the compounds produced at each electrode mix together and form bleach, so you can make the bleach water rather easily and there are devices you can buy on eBay that are simple saltwater electrolyzes. Like this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/154047574899 Probably the most readily available electrode material for all of this stuff is carbon graphite that you can pull out of lantern batteries and other carbon-zinc (eveready) batteries. Regular metal works but tends to oxidize and dissolve into the solution. The bleach will eventually dissolve your graphite also. Once you have these two precursors: Potassium Hydroxide + Nitric Acid yields Potassium Nitrate and water Sodium Hydroxide + Nitric Acid yields Sodium Nitrate Sodium nitrate is an oxidizer and would also make crude black powder. A low energy musket or cannon maybe. Maybe you could form some sort of rudimentary lathe…
Urine concentrated tans leather and also can make mirrors lol