Since the isolation we have come to appreciate the idea that ‘our home is our sanctuary’ and we can do much more with our property to make it even better! While it is essential to get out into the world, we can set ourselves up for success and survival by adding some small DIY survival projects to our to do list.
From quality leisure to practicing survival skills, we are going to look at a collection of survival projects that are small and simple. These are not big DIY builds or things that require plans and a shed full of tools.
You might look over your property and see a bunch of restrictions. You might think you have topped out what is possible. The reality is, there is much more you can do with just a few small spots in a yard or in some woods around the home.
The First One
Making fire and cooking over a fire are two skills that any survivalist should be practicing on a regular basis. Making your own firepit is as simple as stacking some stones in a circle outback.
You could also repurpose things like cast iron grills and use them to burn in.
You can be as simple or as creative as you like with your firepit but having one gives you a means of starting fires and cooking over fires on a regular basis.
Be sure you understand your burning laws and don’t make a firepit of local river or creek rocks as they often contain water and can burst and spray your family with hot rock fragments. Fire brick is the best thing to build the inside of a fire pit from.
A Protein Source On Your Property
The keeping of hens has changed a lot about my preparedness on a whole. From the simple protein standpoint, I have eggs being produced each day. That means we have a protein source on our property. However, we have also managed our land to deal with predators, added trees to provide natural food for the birds and of course we manage a chicken coop.
Making your own chicken coop is easy and if you have no building or wood working acumen you can still make a chicken coop from an old shed. The shed must be secure and safe. It should be as draft free as possible and be able to lock up tight at night to keep predators.
Small, shed coops are easy to clean and give the birds lots of room even on rainy days. However, there are somethings you will have to add to your shed to make it work as a coop.
- Cut some windows and screen them
- Add some roosting polls
- Create nesting boxes on the wall (I have even seen people nest old bowls into a circular cutout of an old wood chair and use it as a nesting area.
- Feeding Area
- Water Container
You can also frame out a small coop with wood and just build your own. This can be a lot of fun because there are a variety of coops and coop building plans you can use to help you build your own little coop.
An Ingenious Project
We have been smoking meat to preserve it probably since we discovered fire! Thousands of years. It plain works, and it is also delicious. Why not have a little smoker in your backyard that you can spark a fire up inside of and smoke some ribs or chickens.
This is an off grid cooking option that any prepper would benefit from.
Using a simple cinderblock base and A framed smokehouse you can build the smoker itself with very little investment.
The A frame can be framed with 2x4s and sit right on top of the cinderblock base. Make your base about 2ft tall with cinderblocks and sit the A frame on top.
You will have to attach a firebox to the cinderblock base to create the smoke. You will need a small metal or brick firebox with a door or opening that can be closed. A simple flue can be used to run hot smoke from the firebox to the smokehouse. Just make sure whatever you use can stand up to the heat!
Another easy tip is to add hooks to your smokehouse rather than racks. These are cheap and easy and can even be forged at home if you have some blacksmithing skills. Get smoking!
Related: How to Build a Smokehouse In Your Backyard
The Most Simple One
Gardening is not as easy as it looks. Depending on where you live and what kind of land you are dealing with, gardening could be an utter nightmare with limited success, at best. It might not be something you feel confident in banking your life on.
We grow in a marsh and we have great years, and we have terrible years. This on/off success brought us to the conclusion that we needed to start thinking about an orchard along with our garden.
So rather than count on the garden for all of our fresh food we started planting peach trees and thinning wild paw paw trees in our backyard.
We have plans to add apples and persimmon this year as we continue to build on our micro orchard. The micro orchard is a great way to produce food and you can plant a lot of dwarf trees on a very little bit of land.
We pull fruit from 8 different trees, at the moment, and our entire property is .8 an acre!
Compost Pile
This one is a no brainer, but I am consistently amazed at how many bags of leaves I see the average American schlepping from the back yard to the curb to be picked up.
When the leaves start falling in my yard, it’s like gold is raining from the sky.
A compost pile can be made from three pallets! You can just have a compost pile covered with a tarp if you want. It is not an investment.
We all know the importance of growing your own food. Compost provides you with a highly nutritious growing medium to bolster your soil year over year.
Related: 39 Items You Can Compost
A Remarkably Simple Build
A microclimate herb garden sounds like something overly complicated but in reality, it’s just a circular spiraling stack of bricks that is built with less bricks on the outer wall but gets taller towards the center.
By building this kind of spiraling brick or stone herb garden you create shadows and wind blocks for some plants and others always get direct sunlight.
This is a remarkably simple build that is just about simply stacking bricks and filling the empty spaces with quality soil and then planting a variety of herbs.
Hygiene Bin
Living through a pandemic, people have come to appreciate things like soap, sanitizer, toilet paper and masks.
To create a simple hygiene bin, you just need to buy a large trashcan with a lid, or some other waterproof container simply begin adding items to this bin on a weekly basis.
Buy an extra bar of soap and toss it in the bin. Add a pack of gloves and some toilet paper the next week. Just keep at this until you fill the trash can or container up. When the next disaster occurs and you have people rushing the stores, you will be able to sit back and know you have hygiene taken care of.
An Uncommon Idea
Pest management is a big part of prepping. This is another aspect that is not overly exciting to the average survivalist but when you have a pantry full of mice, you will give it the respect it deserves.
Mosquitoes are disease carrying monsters that are also a serious nuisance. Bats will eat about 6,000 to 8,000 mosquitoes a night. That is an incredible feat!
Building bat boxes is a great activity to take on with your kids and it yields some great results.
Related: Mosquito-Repelling Weeds That you can Plant in your Backyard
As complicated as our lives have become thanks to things like the pandemic, government response and the riots in our streets, it’s still the simple things in life. Life is still all about the simple and satisfying things in our lives.
When you send an arrow 30 yards downrange into that homemade haybale target you feel a sense of calm like nothing else. This is so important in the age of outrage and fear that we are living through. These small DIY projects are great ways to get your mind off the nonsense and get back to life.
Most everything on this list can be done with kids at your side, too! Get the family involved and round out your fortified survival property.
You may also like:
How To Make A Mini Root Cellar In Your Backyard In Less Than Two Hours
What Medicinal Plants Should Never Be Planted Together (Video)
Disinfect Huge Amounts Of Water With This Common Household Item
25 Powerless Appliances for Your Homestead Kitchen
The Best Natural Sleeping Pill That You Can Grow In Your Backyard
before almost any of the above mentioned I’d recommend a rain catchment system – rain barrels and a way(s) to best utilize that water source ….
Illini: And a graywater tank. Best for that, a covered compost pit. Graywater is high in nitrogen. niio
Excellent idea, but check the rules for your location. Some states maintain you do not own the water that falls on your land and place restrictions.
Gov: rules are in AZ, if it alls on your land, it’s yours. I know PA has some rainwater restrictions, but allow water barrels under drains off the house. But, they must be covered because of mosquitoes. niio
I live in Florida and capture the condensate out of my air conditioner for garden watering.
lahines: I live in Arizona. what’s condensation LOL. We’re getting snow and rain. Hope it keeps it up for a month. niio
Red, condensation is what you put up in the air from your evaporative air conditioners so the East coast can have as precipitation. We have more than enough ppt. 🙂
Yessir! That BAT BOX is gold!
Our bugout haven has a few ponds and creeks, and when they are low–the durn skeeters living in the standing waters will eat you up. We put up some bat boxes, plus the bats like to hang out in a lot of the overhangs our barns and outbuildings have.
At night we just love to watch them fly out and act like vacuum-sweepers of the sky! Bugs-B-Gone!
Where I live I have not seen Any bats for the past two years!!! NONE!!! What is up with that??? Lots of chem-trails tho.!!! LOTS!!
latte: White nose wiped out 98% of the bats in the Northeast and is working its way south and west. niio
Swallows are good too. I see lots of them in the summer where I live, and you can build swallow houses to cultivate them. Here’s a website to tell you more:
https://www.treeswallowprojects.com/buildbox.html
It’s a good alternative if bats creep you out.
You aint lying about those CHEMTRAILS! And ur also correct about their ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT! Glad to see more people talking about GEO-ENGINEERING and chemtrails, because whether folks believe it or not, It is happening WORLDWIDE! And though they don’t like to talk about it much, the government has admitted that this spraying is being done to decrease the sunlight that reaches the Earth in order to fight global warming, and the plan is to do it for the next 200 years! Can you imagine? We will be breathing ALUMINUM, STRONTIUM and all the other micro-particulate matter with every breath for 200 years! And these toxins easily pass through our blood-brain barrier where they are stored and build up! This means Aluminum particulate matter in our brains til Alzheimers sets in, provided we are able to survive that long without dying of cancer or the 5-g radiation that is sure to do the damage over time on all of us! Wake up people! Look up GEO-ENGINEERING to get accurate info on the process rather than chemtrails, where you will get the idea that it’s all just a conspiracy theory, but they are both one and the same! And Yes~! IT’s killing the bats. the Bees, the phyto-plankton in our oveans, the trees and the PEOPLE! Look Up “AGENDA 21” also! Our skies are not blur anymore and our people are brainwashed, conditioned and somehow blind to what is overhead daily sprayed by planes that make nice sunnydays cloudy!
Oakland: Years ago an SF book came out detailing how a mass murderer with a science degree in biology could cause any number of plagues. Looking back, the thing reads like an expose on the chicoms. niio
I’ve been photographing them over my home for over 10 years. If people would just look up and question what they are seeing maybe we could get somewhere. If I point these out to others they look at me like I lost my mind.
A couple of comments on a great article. If you repurpose a shed for a chicken coop, If your “coop” has a raised floor. Leaves can be swept under it to insulate the floor and raked out to the compost next spring. If you have cold winters hay bales next to walls can add insulation. And again into the compost come spring. I don’t clean my coops in the winter. I just add more straw to help insulate. “Deep litter”method. Be careful using plastic trash bins. Racoon’s can gnaw through them in short order, use new ones or do not have any pretty smelling soap.
Galvanized trash cans with metal lids will keep out everything except bears and maybe large raccoons. The way to defeat this varmints is to run a chain or cable through the side handles and through the lid handle and lock it snugly against the lid.
Interestingly, the 45 gallon trash can that used to be ubiquitous apparently is only carried by a very limited number of vendors. You are going to have to search hard for it. As in The Graduate, the answer is “What are plastics, Alex?” In addition, there is shipping. The larger size galvanized trash cans are too big to go by the small parcel delivery services. They have to go by LTL trucking. There the rates are by room taken up as typically weight isn’t a problem. They take up a lot of room and heavy stuff can’t be piled on top of them. Expensive freight.
Another project that wasn’t mentioned was a burn barrel. Again, the burn barrel has to be metal. It should have a lid because sparks can fly out of the top of the can.
Back in day of yore, we burned cans and jars before they went to the city dump to hold down rats at the dump. They went into our yard incinerator first and then got cleaned out and either saved if the scrap man was making regular runs or went to the town dump.
In an EOTW situation, water will be too scarce to waste on washing out cans and jars. Jars and bottles weill be scarce and valuable, so they will be worth washing out but cans will need to be cleared of food particles and burning them in an incinerator is the easiest and uses no water.
Cans can be used to make caltrops but burning them won’t prevent them from being use in that manner. Can lids can be used to make razor wire too and burning won’t preclude that purpose.
You might want to burn used toilet paper and excreta. If you don’t have room on your suburban lot for an outhouse, burning might be the only way to get rid of it.
I happily remember when we discovered a can of hair spray thrown in a burn barrel exploded just like the grenades in Sands of Iwo Jima.
Those were the day, Mike. We did so many things that would have child protective services swooping down on our homes and snatching us from our parents these days.
Yet somehow we survived and learned things that may prove quite helpful in some of the forecasts come to pass.
What about setting up beehives on your property?
The Japanese have sey up aviaries on rooftops in downtown Tokyo. They have found that there are actually more flowers in town in the parks and as decorative flower baskets than in some more rural areas. They have been quite successful in rooftop bee keeping. The big AND is that there is a lot less insecticide being sprayed around in downtown Tokyo than in rural areas.
That should be “apiaries” for those of you who are wondering what bird cages have to do with beekeeping. Apparently predictive doesn’t have apiary in its vocabulary and snuck in what it thought I meant to say. I sometimes wonder if corrections are made just prior to hitting the send button. I know I proofread that post but somehow missed the fatal error or it got changed after I proofread. I know predictive is slow and sometimes I am four or five words ahead of it. Sorry for the error.
Interestingly enough, even my dictionary app doesn’t have apiary in its vocabulary. I didn’t realize that was such a specialized word.
Apiaries for bees. Aviaries are for birds… perhaps for raising “feral rock doves” AKA pigeons? Also a good source of protein, BTW, if the hawks don’t get them first.
Or planning/planting a bee garden? Many flowers that attract pollinators also have other uses that increase their value, ie. medicinal uses.
Bird feeders attract sparrows, doves, squirrels and deer.
Interesting to watch for the time being.
They also attract rats. We had to deal with that this year. As much as we love the birds, we will never do that again.
According to folks who claim to know, bird feeders, although incredibly popular in the U.S., are harmful to wild birds. They congregate in larger numbers around bird feeders than they do in the natural state and thus are more susceptible to transmission of disease. It also quickly makes them dependent and unable to forage if the bird feeding is cut off for some reason or another. I guess welfare isn’t good for any animal life by making the animal dependent and unable to fend for itself. Wonder if we can get the folks in Washington to absorb that lesson?
In addition, because there is an almost direct connection between ingesting food and expelling waste in birds, a bird feeder concentrates bird feces which is a breeding ground for diseases, some of which can infect humans. In the wild, food sources are more scattered and thus don’t have the congregating effect that a bird feeder has.
I’ve been watching and feeding birds for 45 years. The effect bird feeders had has always been an interesting question, the answer is they have little effect on bird habits or populations. They really only serve as entertainment for the fool who buys black oil sunflower seeds for them at .35 a pound.
Bird habits change with climate change and other environment wide changes. In the 1970s the Texas coast was a major rice growing region and millions of geese from all over North America wintered there. It was amazing to step out of your truck on a road running through the fields and hear ten thousand geese calling all around you. But Texas couldn’t compete with Asian growers, the big rice fields are gone. At the same time the ethanol subsidies drove a huge increase in Northern corn production so the geese spend their winters in the Mid West now gleaning corn. I miss those critters.
Brings to mind a survival hack I never see mentioned, back before Texas fisherman had enough sonar to track Red October we used to bait an area in a lake where fish would naturally congregate by putting dry dog food or pelletized livestock food in a burlap back weighted with stones. Fish it with jigs or bait, makes it easy to catch dinner, must be illegal these days.
I can’t believe all you smart people don’t know apiaries are where they keep apes.
Mike: Interesting that the Texas rice growers couldn’t compete with Asian rice growers. California rice growers not only are thriving but are actually shipping California rice to Japan. The Japanese spurn the California rice as not tasting as good as domestically grown rice but when they see the price of CalRose vs. Japan grown, taste goes out the window.
There was a huge scandal a few years back, a rice importer was labeling CalRose as Japan grown rice and selling it for the Japan-grown premium price. Guess there wasn’t that much difference in the taste after all. We didn’t hear about it here in the States but it was a huge scandal in Japan.
All the community colleges in the PDRK twenty years ago were recruiting Asian students. The Asian students paid out of state fees for college but it was still cheaper to go to college here in the states even taking into consideration room and board and transportation. The wife and I offered home stay for Japanese students. The family of one of the students who stayed with us owned farm land in Japan. Yearly they sent us fresh rice grown on their farm. New rice is a big deal in Japan. Sort of like this year’s Nouveau Beaujolais in France. My wife always said she could taste the difference between CalRose and the fresh rice from Japan but my uneducated tongue couldn’t taste any difference.
And the rice fields in the San Joaquin Valley north of Schitzomento are great hunting grounds for ducks and geese. It is denoted the western flyway. There is also good hunting in the rice and other grain fields around the Colorado River in SoCal and some of the river bottoms that actually have year round water. Hunting used to be really prime in California until the bambiests took control of the Department of Fish and Game which is no longer that but the Department of Fish and Wildlife. With the escalating price of licenses and the drop dead dates that fishing and hunting licenses have the number of licenses sold in the state has steadily declined since about 1990.
DFG used to stock rainbow trout in the year round lakes of SoCal. They stopped doing that because of budget problems. When they stopped stocking the lakes the number of fishing licenses sold each year started plummeting. Part of the budge of the DFG is the sale of fishing and hunting licenses. Somehow the dunderheads in Schitzomento can’t connect No stocking = fewer licenses=less money for stocking and other activities including game wardens. Fewer game wardens = less enforcement and more poaching=less game to protect=need for game wardens is depressed=fewer jobs for the DFG=ever decreasing budget allocations. I know, it is a complicated formula and too tortuous for bureaucrats to figure to the end result.
Funny… sounds like Common Core Math…right up their alley….?
Here, the WDFW is filled with a bunch of save the whalers. They didn’t raise and release any salmon this year. Sure, they want to save money, but it is more to just keep casual fishermen out of their boats. The fishing regs books are thicker every year. No bait balls out in the sound, but the whale watch tours are thriving, or were thriving until the plague.
I’m wondering if this decline in stocking game fish, selling hunting and fishing licenses, mismanagement of forested areas leading to dangerous build ups of flammable brush, et al is deliberate.
Discouraging self sufficiency and off grid living, forcing people to move to more urban areas or potentially get burned out sounds like a plot for a conspiracy theory novel, but we have seen governments manipulate the people before to further an agenda.
Thoughts?
Miss Kitty,
You observations are very interesting and maybe right on the mark. I sometimes think it is just rampant incompetence, but decisions are being made and, at the very least, people are given less consideration than the whales, the trees. Agenda 21 shows we are at the bottom of the intended pecking order. I read a science fiction book once where everybody had an apartment that was equal to about a small bedroom. That’s what the Agenda 21 people want us put in. I think Agenda 21 has been superceded by an even more aggressive plan. (i need to read up on that.) They hate private land ownership. The misuse of public domain, undermining of stand your ground, stupid rules about you not owning the water that falls on your property. Yeah, now that I think about it, you are dead on.
Miz Kitty Yes and no. I think it’s mostly general incompetence if socialists. Greed always is a factor. Meanwhile, let’s see if Claude can get someone like you and CC to write some articles on apartment bugging-in. .niio
Interesting about the competitiveness of Texas rice, trying to find out about that but Texas rice growing info is frustratingly opaque. Probably more a matter of Houston sprawling out into the rice fields, that city is either swamp or freeway, and the freeway under construction.
Out there, the only animals they are really interested in “managing” are Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Actually, apes are primates. They are kept in the primaries. Maybe that’s why we get the choices we have in the general elections.
Remember Gary Hart and his boat the “Monkey Business”?
Actually, the comparison is an insult to our hairy cousins.
Sorry to hear that.
That would be a problem.
I’m still waiting for a bear to take mine down.
Doves, squirrels and deer are fine and all are tasty. If you can bring them into your yard after the EOTW, all well and good. Sparrows don’t have enough meat on them to make them worthwhile harvesting unless you can use netting and catch a bunch of them.
Sparrows are TEOTWAWKI entertainment.
But not in many locations.
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie…
Isn’t that a dainty dish to set before the King…
The king – “It tastes like chicken!”
Miz Kitty: LOL!
If we used pallets for our compost bins the termites would have them eaten within the year. We use cinder blocks and never have to work about the termites. 4 good sized bins has worked well for us. We also do no-till gardening and put the excess leaves and grass on the beds for over-wintering. The beds become additional compost bins.
Miss Kitty: Read this. It will scare and anger you, make you sick, but it IS happening!
https://deeprootsathome.com/whats-up-with-egg-shortage-chicken-feed/
Good ideas but that photo beside the “hygiene bin”….. I certainly would not store those items in a deep trash can that you will have trouble reaching to the bottom of when you need to retrieve items and I REALLY would not store it outside. Instead, get some stackable bins and store things in those. They can be easily moved from one location to another, they can be taken with you in your vehicle if you need to bug out, they can be transported to the local church or food bank if you decide to donate items and they can be stored indoors, away from weather, pests and thieves, both 2-legged and 4-legged.
I pick up first aid and hygiene supplies when I stop into the “Dollar Store” and store them in boxes (with detailed labels) with our prepping supplies.
Whenever we stay at a motel, I grab all the little amenities, the soaps, shampoos, lotions, coffee packs and paper and plastic cups. When I get home, the bath items go into plastic shoeboxes and get stored in the guest bathroom and the coffee and accompanying supplies go into a bin in with the prepping storage. Nobody in our family drinks coffee but this way, I have some for guests and, when everything goes to H*** in a hand basket, I will have some for barter.
I have also put together some zippered sandwich bags that contain a motel bar of soap, a shampoo and a conditioner, a bottle of lotion, a disposable, 1-time-use toothbrush, a little vitamin jar filled with salt, a couple of tea bags, packets of sugar and some peppermint candies. If the worst happens, I might not have any food to share but I can at least hand out or donate to a church some morale-boosting hygiene packs. So far, I have about a hundred of these put together and stored away. Didn’t cost me much, a few dollars for a box of 100 sandwich bags, a few dollars for a 3# bag of peppermints, salt is cheap, a box of sugar in packets is cheap or you can pick up an extra 1 or 2 whenever you eat out, and the toothbrushes, preloaded with a dab of toothpaste, are available online for $.10 or $.15 each if you buy the boxes of 25 or 50 (I can’t remember exactly anymore). And you can recruit your friends to collect the soaps, etc, for you. I prefer to use my own, better quality, soap and shampoo when I travel, so I don’t use the free ones anyway. Might as well put them to good use.
Unless you stay overnight in the PDRK where motels and hotels are forbidden to leave toiletries in rooms. “It adds to the landfill burden.”
I think you can still schlep down to the front counter and request toiletry items for your room, but no more just having the hotel staff leave them in the room.
Pretty soon you will have to bring your own linens and towels for a stay overnight in Motel Six where the light is not on for you because it uses up valuable natural resources.
California has become a modernized third world country and getting worse each passing month. That governor over there is a nut case in a suit. He is absolutely crazy.
Stu: I totally agree and now that he has seen what he can get away with, without a murmur from the legislature, issuing goobinatorial edicts, it is only going to get worse.
We might as well not have a legislature, really. Since the dimorats have instituted with the help of an illiterate electorate, two top candidates in any primary go on the general election regardless of party. So in many districts your choice in the general election is dimorat or dimorat. It’s like some fascist country where you get to vote but there is only one candidate for each position. Same in the PDRK. If you live in San Francisco, all the candidates in the general election are dimorats. In places lie Bakersfield, you might actually get to different parties in the general election but unfortunately the dimorat party which seems to thrive on illegal immigration has managed to stack the deck against the two party system.
Well, that’s off topic by a wide margin.
Well, we had been discussing how to keep vermin out of the garbage, so…not so much!
in regard to using garbage cans for outdoor storage >>> garbage cans are one of the poly products that use recycled plastics heavily in the manufacture – wouldn’t use one for the storage of much of anything …
any container for exposed outdoor storage has to be gasket sealed with a positive locking lid – nothing short of a Pelican case is going to protect the contents from all the elements …..
Glad to see I’m not the only one who collects all the hotel amenities. My family think I am nuts for doing so. I even grab the toilet paper and Kleenex. Yes, I am that frugal. Sometimes a towel ends up in the suit case by accident.
Sabel: Each time were buy bath soap, it’s a different color. When the bars wear sown, they get saved and later will be coarse-chopped in the food processor. That gets recycled via an old sock into new bars the little kids call pokedot soap. niio
I’ve been watching a series of YouTube tv shows entitled “Mein Schoenest Land” from NDRTV. Real life depictions of seasonal family life on 300 plus year old North German Farms and the families that still live there. Many ideas noted here are things they have been doing for generations. Some unbelievable recipes too. Although it’s all in German, one can follow along and really get some good ideas to think about and put into practice. There are many of the self sufficient skills brought here
by our early settlers incorporated into their everyday modern life.
I don’t have back yard chickens anymore, but following an old farmer’s advice, my former chickens were given – and liked – small covered plastic kitty litter boxes as nesting boxes. They were really easy to pick up by the handle and take apart outside the coop for cleaning, and were quite cozy.
Interesting article and as always good comments.
Don’t forget that reloading closet.
Cooking stones are clean usually round stones that are fire-resistant. they need to be stored for 6 months before using. this allows all moisture to evaporate from the stones and keeps them from exploding or cracking. In the event you cannot keep pots, these are the best thing to use to boil food in a deer hide. When not in use, keep them dry! niio
Or a reed basket. Before the white man arrived and messed up the landscape the local indians used hot rocks to heat water in reed baskets. Hot rocks or hot metal can be used to heat water in almost any watertight vessel. Just be sure not to touch the red hot poker to the vessel itself. Now that I am thinking along these line it seems to me I have seen a recipe for hot mulled wine that involves a red hot poker heated in the fireplace.
LCC: Hot mulled cider? Fireplace, comfortable chair. That’s the life o’ Riley. Get to it! niio