Month: November 2010

4 Free Members Support Brigade Memberships and Knife giveaway!

Jack Spirko from The Survival Podcast has agreed to give away 4 free 1 year memberships to the members support brigade to 4 lucky subscribers to the Save Our Skills Newsletter

To win the membership you must be subscribed to the Save Our Skills Newsletter. You can join the newsletter by entering your name and email in the right column where it says “Get Email Updates”.

For now you will only receive an email when a post is made to the website, but in the future I intend to develop content that will be pushed only to newsletter subscribers. Your email will not be shared or spammed.

On Monday November 29th I will select 4 lucky winners using random.org.

What will an MSB membership give you?

  • Discounts from over 25 supporting vendors
  • 9 Free eBooks in PDF format
  • Downloadable MP4 version of many of the TSP YouTube Videos
  • Zip Files of Every Episode of TSP
  • The right to display MSB Badges in your forum signature

But wait that is not all!!

The first person we randomly select to win an MSB membership will also receive a Leatherman Skeletool compliments of SaveOurSkills.com

So what are you waiting for… Join the mailing list now!

I made some pumpkin ale in a pumpkin

So after posting a link to some guys that made pumpkin beer in a pumpkin I knew this was something I had to do immediately!

Well I am a beginner and not ashamed to admit it. I figured before going whole hog with the instructions I would first undertake brewing a beer using a kit. The way I would take it over the top was to brew it in a pumpkin. I do have some homebrew experience having already made my own hard cider. I selected a standard “english ale” which I assumed would be similar to something like Bass Ale, not a huge flavor profile, but smooth.

So I invited my good friend Rob over and we smoked a beer can chicken with some “live free or die” IPA and made pumpkin ale. It was a ton of fun and the end result is mighty tasty if I don’t say so myself.

Here is the biggest lesson I have learned from all this: Even with the kit from the homebrew you can make over 2 cases of beer for about $16 after it is all said and done. Given that the average case microbrew costs over $30 this is a great costs savings. If your a fan of microbrew beer consider brewing your own.

Coming up in the homebrew series I will show you how you can make your own homebrew equipment for dirt cheap. I’m not sure when I will get to this project but it’s on my radar. Right now I am spending too much time preserving the end of my apple harvest.

Episode 7: A hunting and trapping primer

Jason Akers joins me on the Podcast to talk about hunting. Hunting is something I really know nothing about and have never participated in. Jason has been hunting his entire life and is a regular contributor of articles to backwoods home magazine.

We talk about all sorts of things including hunting, trapping, skinning, field dressing small and large game, types of traps, methods of hunting.

In one hour we have barely scratched the surface of all the directions we could go with this so please get on the comments and let us know what sort of things you want to know about.

I’m also very excited about Jason’s new project which is huntgathergroweat.com

If you couldn’t figure it out from the title the website is all about hunting, gathering, growing, and of course eating (cooking)

Also please check out some other links mentioned on today’s show

Survival Gear Bags Contest Voting is NOW OPEN!

Get your vote on!

Vote for your favorite YouTube video idea. To make it fair the voting page is totally randomized on each page load. If you want to send your particular idea to a friend each idea has it’s own unique URL. Just click on the idea to vote on it and get the URL to share with your friends

If you encounter any problems with it just email me at nick at saveourskills dot com\

Go to the link below to vote:

https://saveourskills.com/sos.php

Using the incredible cattail

First off, I apologize for not getting the contest online last night. Some of you might have learned from the facebook page that I am basically working non-stop at my job right now. It happens. I’ll do what I can to get those up this week, but if worst comes to worst I’ll post the contest this weekend and extend the deadline.

Today’s submission comes to me again from Backwood’s Home magazine via John Daleske who has already sent in so many great articles to Save Our Skills and I would just like to thank him again for all of his contributions.

The Cattail is a wondrous plant. Keven details many of the uses in a great article. He writes:

“I can think of no other North American plant that is more useful than the cattail. This wonderful plant is a virtual gold mine of survival utility. It is a four-season food, medicinal, and utility plant. What other plant can boast eight food products, three medicinals, and at least 12 other functional uses?”

Read remainder of aritcle…