need help, i was told you can use bullrushes for tinder, is it ture, what or how do you use it. i believe bullrush is also know as cattails & mace reed.
what tinder do you use
what tinder do you use
Yep, with bullrush aka cat-tail aka greater reedmace, it's the fluffy mature seed heads you're looking for. I usually see them from very early spring through to about midsummer.
Like all fluff tinders, the problem is that they tend to flash over very quickly, as others have mentioned. There's a few things you can do about this... The most effective, but least bushcrafty, is to rub some petroleum jelly through it, just like you would with cotton wool. The option I usually go for is to mix some fluff with shredded birch bark - the fluff goes up very easily, and is enough to get the bark going. Or you can just make sure you've got some very good, fine kindling on your fluff bundle - I reckon you could get that to go up nicely, although you might have to manipulate it a bit (and very quickly) to get it to catch right.
I'm sure I've heard of the fluff being soaked, compressed, and dried to make a coal tinder that can take a spark, but I've never tried it. Come to think of it, I've got a bag of reedmace fluff kicking around here somewhere, I should give it a try...
Unfortunately, innonotus obliquus seems to be extremely rare over here... I've never found any.
That's what I used to think. I now know that there is a lot of it in this country, but it's not widespread.