Bringing inside the lovely smell of an outdoor campfire

[Barb]

I’m looking for ways to create a camp-wood fire smell for use indoors. Candles, incense, soaps, burning sage, aren’t hitting the mark - too light, not even a remotely smoky scent, or too acrid.

A friend recommended Birch Tar. I can find things made of/with Birch Tar, but nothing that states anything about a campfire smell, or makes me confident I’m going to find what I’m looking for.

Searching this site gives me hope I’ll find an interactive resource to help me get started, troubleshoot, and tweak - soup to nuts!

Any takers? Please?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Toddy]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

If you can get hold of sawdust, then soak in some in Birch Tar essential oil. Not a lot of either is needed, a couple of desert spoonsful of sawdust will last a long while.
Put it into a glass jar that has a decent-ish lid.
Add essential oil (Try ten drops to start with for the oil. Easy to add up from there in increments) and shake and put it aside for a day or so.

If it's cold, and you have radiators on, then putting the opened jar on top of the radiator will slowly give off the scent.

You can use a burner, but you have to watch that the sawdust doesn't char and end up burning or scorching the oil.

The essential oil mix matters though. I like cedar wood, but I like to add bergamot to mine too.

Scents and smells are very emotive, very personal. It can be fun playing about, and old jars and sawdust cost nothing

M

 

[Pattree]

I love the smell of a wood fire and am lucky enough to have an open fire place. If I’m burning a fruit wood I will sometimes pull a glowing piece out into the hearth and let a little smoke into the room.
One problem is that woodsmoke it’s hot. A cold fire site smells quite different.

You’ve given me a thought. I’m working with Rowan branches and using a power sander. I love the smell of the hot wood - it’s quite musky.
I wonder if I soaked a dry stick in salt peter it would keep glowing like a cigarette - that’s a project for later.

 

[Toddy]

Fruit woods are lovely on a fire.
I keep my apple tree prunings and make faggots from them. Old fashioned idea to make 'logs' from brash, used to be common among fuel poor peoples. Practical too, because they'll start a fire well or they'll slowly dry off and smoulder among the embers overnight if fresh, ready to start it again in the morning.

 

[Robbi]

Fruit woods are lovely on a fire.
I keep my apple tree prunings and make faggots from them. Old fashioned idea to make 'logs' from brash, used to be common among fuel poor peoples. Practical too, because they'll start a fire well or they'll slowly dry off and smoulder among the embers overnight if fresh, ready to start it again in the morning.

I like the idea of these faggots / logs from brash Toddy, do you have any further information.?

Robbi

 

[Toddy]

It's just gathering up sticks and twigs and packing them tightly together, and binding them enough to hold.

Mind those tinder parcels I made ? well you can stuff a faggot too
It's a lovely way to remember places by the smell from what you picked up.

I find that using something like green ivy or long heather stems to bind the faggot works quite well.
It become a knack, I find it easier to intertwine the faggot as I pick up stuff, sort of weaving in and through and back on itself. Thin whippy stuff like birch is good for that, honeysuckle is excellent, holly's good, willow's good, nettles too, but try to get sound stuff in it that will burn slow, like the fruit wood prunings. Oak, Ash, and the like if you can.

No point making the faggot bigger than your hearth or stove can take though. I kind of aim for a couple of handspans long by as thick as I can get my hands around. Pack it tight, if the ends stick out fold them back into the body of it.
They're not as good as a log, but with care they're sound and they'll burn nicely. If they fall open in a hot fire they'll just flare up though. Still scents the air and gives off a lot of fast hot heat.

Surely after all these years we have photos of them up someplace ?

I'll look.

 

[Toddy]

Not finding images, but @Broch posted (no5) a really good list of woods and how they burn

Favorite and good fire wood

I know the Finnish woods well so I have no trouble choosing fire wood. In the wild it is most often Scots pine, something else not so often. What would be your chosen species in the UK or in the Continent, a lot more species to choose from than here. At my cottage I think I burn birch mostly...

bushcraftuk.com

@spandit posted about using leylandii ones

Leylandii faggot

I've had some leylandii taken down and have been burning the brash in a barrel. At the bottom of the barrel is a Kadai charcoal maker in which I'm converting my coppiced willow. Unfortunately, there's a lot of brash and it's time consuming cutting it small enough to fit in the barrel so I...

bushcraftuk.com

but mentioned elsewhere that Hawthorn trimmings were traditional for faggots.

 

[slowworm]

I think they can be called pimps. I'm sure I found a method of tying them easily but a search for "faggots pimps vice" seems to show something different.

This page shows the fire twig bundles: https://www.mot.be/en/opzoeken/bakovens/gebruik-je-oven/takkenbos-binden

 

[Toddy]

I don't know whether to laugh (it's BcUK, I'm supposed to behave) or to love that last post

Oh very posh
Fair puts my wandering and packing tight bundles to shame.

We used big long faggot bundles to cover roofs in the past. Not everyone had access to straw, but you can bundle up bracken or field rushes, or heather, and it works.

 

[Tantalus]

I do believe faggots deserve their own thread on here but until then ...

Gorse was widely collected for use in faggots, a plant that nobody really wanted on their property and were willing to let anybody and everybody just help themselves to.

I remember seeing black and white pictures of men with one leg arm and shoulder all in leather so they could work cutting the gorse by hand for this.

Wish I could find them again, was an interesting glimpse into a bygone way of life.

 

[Toddy]

My Dad, out wandering, got caught in a sudden downpour, so he cooried down under a gorse bush (better a wee bush than nae bield, goes the proverb) and decided to brew up.
Funny stuff is gorse, it goes up quick ! :yikes:

Apparently fire's good for it because it dries off and fires off those wee seeds in a hurry too.

I never thought about it for faggots though. No wonder the men needed leather armour though; it's brutal stuff to cut back.
If you thrash it though, shatter the thorns, it's supposed to be good animal feed.....I think you'd have to be heck of a hard up to try that.

 

[Tantalus]

"If you thrash it though, shatter the thorns, it's supposed to be good animal feed.....I think you'd have to be heck of a hard up to try that."

Rabbits and sheep will happily browse the tender shoots in the first half of the year but yeah after that it gets pretty tough to deal with.

I guess in the middle of a hard frost or even a decent snow you can still find green fodder for the animals, even if you do have to take it home and beat it with mallets/ a big stone to soften it and make it passable for them.

Fine for the dairy cow in the barn but I wouldn't want to feed 20 of them

 

[matarius777]

I got some Wilma Nordic Summer insect repellant a couple of months ago, off Ray Mears site. It has pine tree tar in it and is very reminiscent of a campfire. When I got it, I actually put some on a couple of days running just for the smell and it’s association!

 

[slowworm]

I just leave a used bee smoker in the kitchen.

 

[Broch]

My work jacket (waxed cotton) holds the smell for about two weeks hanging in the hall. And, like Pattree, pulling a gently smoking log out of the burner gives a lovely aroma - unfortunately, the missus doesn't agree

 

[The puffin squire]

I'd suggest a latakia heavy pipe tobacco as a base for a bonfire based essence

Sent from my SM-S911B using Tapatalk

 

[Crac]

The simplest way would be to get a stainless steel bottle and a wood gasifier.

Use the gasifier, to automatically coat the outside of the bottle in wood tar. (Which is under 30 seconds.)

To activate: fill the bottle with hot water/tea. And enjoy the smell of the great outdoors.

You can refresh the bottle every two weeks using the gasifier.

 

[Toddy]

I'd suggest a latakia heavy pipe tobacco as a base for a bonfire based essence

Sent from my SM-S911B using Tap

My work jacket (waxed cotton) holds the smell for about two weeks hanging in the hall. And, like Pattree, pulling a gently smoking log out of the burner gives a lovely aroma - unfortunately, the missus doesn't agree

Went to a Scottish meet, my chute was up and we'd been burning birch all weekend. It was damp but not wet when I packed it up. I came home and pretty much straight away had to head off for a fortnight's work.
We have an open staircase with a nine foot long railing at the top landing, so I draped the chute over it and said to Himself that if he'd just shove it in a bag when it was dry, I'd pack it away properly when I got home.

I got home and Himself said, like your Missus, that he doesn't agree that it's a lovely aroma, so he'd shoved the chute in the washing machine
Next meet up all I got were questions about why my chute smelled of Persil
He washed out all that lovely waterproofing of the birch tar too

Birch smoke; the smell lingers.