Containers

A metal can, a glass jar or a plastic drum is worth more than a week of your labour and can go straight into storage or onto the fire (metal and glass only).

Never use a container that held fuel, pesticide, solvent or industrial chemicals for water or food, however well it is washed — plastics absorb them. Food-grade plastics are commonly marked HDPE, recycling code 2. Plastic never goes on a fire. Wash every scavenged vessel with hot water and soap, and disinfect water containers — see making water safe.

Peel birch, elm, lime or cedar bark in late spring and early summer, when the sap runs and bark lifts off in sheets. Score a vertical cut through the bark only — not into the wood — and ease the sheet off. Take it from fallen or felled trees; ring-barking a standing tree kills it.

Fold the corners in rather than cutting them, so the container has no seams at the bottom. Stitch the sides with split spruce or pine root through awl holes, clamp while drying, and seal every seam with warm pitch.

Stake-and-strand from willow or hazel rods: cut in winter, and soak dried rods about a day for every 30 cm of length until they bend without cracking. Uprights (stakes) at even spacing, weavers passed in and out, packed down hard.

Coiled basket from a bundle of grass, rush or pine needles about 1 cm thick, spiralled up and stitched to the coil below with split root or yucca fibre. Stitch tightly and closely; a close-coiled basket coated inside with hot pitch holds water.

Heat stones in the fire 30–45 minutes and move them with tongs of green wood into the water. Budget about 1–2 kg of red-hot stone per litre of water to bring it to the boil, then more to hold it there — see making water safe for how long.

Use dense, dry stone from dry ground — granite, basalt. Rinse off ash first in a separate container, or the water tastes of it. Stones crack after a few heatings; replace them.

Gourds: harvest when the stem has turned brown and the shell is hard enough that a thumbnail will not dent it. Dry in shade with air around it for 1–6 months, until the seeds rattle. Cut the opening, scrape out the dry pith, and rinse.

Hide and paunch vessels: a rawhide bag or a cleaned animal stomach, hung from a tripod, holds water for hot-stone boiling. Keep hide for clothing and footwear where you can — hides do not scale, and you will run short of them before you run short of bark.

Rodents and damp take more of a harvest than any other cause — up to a fifth of an unprotected store, and far more in a bad year.

Store on raised platforms with guards rats cannot climb past, or in sealed containers they cannot gnaw — metal, fired clay with a lid weighted down, glass. Keep the store dry and ventilated, and keep food off the floor and away from walls so you can see droppings. Build this before the harvest. The granary build has the dimensions that work.

The measure is throughput, not craft: can the group boil 20 litres of water in a day and store a month of dry food safe from rodents and rain? Anything less and water treatment and food storage are both stalled.

Then move to pottery as soon as clay and fuel allow. It is the first container that goes on a fire indefinitely, holds liquid permanently, and can be made in quantity.