We seem to spend an awful lot of time pondering over the best ways to light a campfire. I am not sure that we have cracked it yet either, but there will be plenty of time this year to continue the experiment.
In our early days we used traditional (bought at the local garage at the last minute) kerosene soaked blocks but as reliable as they are it pained me every time I lit one. The smell gets everywhere and I always used more than I should have. They are not very kind to the environment and that just doesn’t sit well here at Ling’s Meadow.
Last year we discovered biomass and vegetable oil firelighters and I thought I had solved all our problems. They are great when you get them lit, don’t get me wrong, but I kept finding partly burned firelighters abandoned in our fire pits as campers gave up after a long struggle. It was an incredible waste of matches too! They feel and smell great, but there is a knack to using them and the tightly compacted biomass block has to be ‘roughed up’ a little before it will light. These firelighters were a bit like Marmite, campers either loved them or hated them.
So this year, we have decided to add a new challenge for our campers and a new type of firelighter to try. I have been experimenting with wood wool, scrunched up into balls. This is much less dense than the biomass blocks and therefore won’t burn for as long, but it should in theory be easier to light. To increase the burn time of the wood wool you can soak the balls in melted wax, and I may even give this a go too. We use our own wood from the farm or seasoned 1/4 logs from a local supplier that we cut down into kindling ourselves. This means that we can cut smaller pieces of kindling to make it easier. We also burn locally made charcoal and this is a real joy to use. It is as light as air and very efficient. Some of the bags contain whole chunks of wood and it is really nice to see this rather than the uniform round ‘pebbles’ that you see elsewhere.
The challenge that I mentioned earlier will be trying to light campfires with our new fire steel! We will have matches as back up, but we will be encouraging campers to give it a try. Neel has been experimenting and we can report that the most successful method so far is lighting newspaper, which then lights the wood wool, which in turn lights the kindling. So I had better start removing the Sunday papers from the recycling bin ready for May!