Fishing for Newbs

             Hey folks! Maybe it was just how we were both raised, but for my husband, John, and I, no summer is complete without fishing. Besides enjoying nature, relaxing, and (hopefully) catching some tasty fish to cook up at home, it's a pretty cheap pastime! I have a special guest post from John today for those of you who may have never been fishing before because you've never had a chance or just didn't know where to begin!


Basic fishing:

Gear:
Fishing pole - I recommend the Dock Demon by Zebco. It's small and portable, relatively cheap, and good quality. You can get cheaper poles, but they are harder to use. They also are light enough to feel the small fish biting the hook.
Hooks - Small panfish/cricket hooks are a great general hook.
Sinkers - Small but heavy, about pea sized.
Bobber - Optional, but whatever you like best.
Bait - I like old fashioned live bait: Worms and Crickets.
Fishing license - Some states have discounts/free for veterans and old/young. Do not skip this - they do not mess around with game/fishing laws.

            Pole should come pre-strung with fishing line. Feed line through pole guides and tie on hook. I recommend the Palomar knot - easy to tie and very strong. Feed line through hook eye then back out eye so you have a loop. Tie a standard knot in the loop around hook, feed hook through loop and tighten. Trim excess line. Place sinker about 1-2 ft away from hook. Place bobber above this (3-4 ft from hook is a good general size.) Bait your hook and have fun.
            Cast for shady areas, where you see fish, or just wherever. Best fishing times are generally early morning/sunrise till 10-11am and again at sunset, but fish will feed throughout the day often "starting back up" every 1-2 hr.
            I prefer casting with no bobber and I place the bait to cover the sharp hook end to prevent snags. You will lose a lot of hooks if there is a lot of debris on the water bottom. Just reel slowly and pause every now and then from reeling.
            Experiment with the depth of the line using bobbers, Sometimes fish are near the surface, sometimes they are deep. It depends on time of day/time of year and water temp.
            When you feel a bite (a tug on the line or you see the bobber or tip of pole go down) jerk hard back/up on the pole while reeling. This "sets the hook". Reel in your fish. Be quick, but don't try to rip them out of the water either.
            Follow whatever rules/regulations are in place for your fishing area/state/lake etc.. For fish size/type/limit.


            As far as preparing and eating fish goes, my favorite is panfish (bluegill, sunfish, etc..) Filet them, take skin off. Rinse fillets well and check for bones.
            Soak in saltwater (milk for catfish) for an hour or so in fridge (gets rid of any bad fishy taste). In a gallon bag, place several cups of yellow cornmeal with salt and pepper to taste. Fry in peanut oil at 350-400 degrees Fahrenheit. Pieces are done when they float and are flaky when broken open.
            Optional way:  Place fillets in baking dish. Liberally drizzle with melted butter. Sprinkle with fresh lemon juice and a light dusting of creole seasoning. (I prefer Tony Chachere's Original Creole Seasoning.)

Helpful Links:

Knot
Same Knot
Creole
Pole
Hooks
Sinkers
Bobbers 

 

 

Making a Homestead: Getting Off Our Lazy Butts!

             Hey folks! I am super excited to be bringing you the very first Farm Fridays post and link-up here on Mixed Bag Mama this week! I have so many homesteading posts going on right now (tis the season, right?) I figured why not? Some weeks I will be doing a separate post and just linking up to the link-up post. Others I will just have the link-up post with a bit about what we've been doing that week in the intro. It just depends on how long my post is. :P We were pretty busy outdoors last week, so this inaugural post gets its own separate page!

             Hey folks! I have to admit that other than the chickens, we have TOTALLY been slacking on all the homesteady type stuff we started this spring. We recently came across the Abundant Permaculture guy (Justin Rhodes on YouTube) and just watching his videos has given us the push and motivation we needed to take back our yard and gardens that we've been neglecting.

I can breathe!

             Despite our utter and complete neglect, we do have some plants that are actually growing and some that are even producing already! I got out a couple of days ago and freed our blueberry plants that actually made it. Unfortunately, we planted our berry bushes too early and the raspberries didn't make it. However, we have a TON of wild black raspberry bushes growing all over the place, so we're pretty set on those anyways. Also, I'm not gonna lie: I completely forgot we planted a grapevine too until hubby pointed it out while I was weed eating.

            Speaking of those black raspberries, check this out. This is just from going out and picking the easy-to-get-to ones several evenings. There are easily 2-3x this many in hard to reach places! Myka and John have actually been picking the majority of them, so I hope to get out there more myself and try to sell some!

            We've had a crazy amount of chamomile too. It's right next to the back walkway, so I've been better about keeping up with harvesting it. We've got a buttload already drying, so I can't wait to make some tea with it! I'm not sure how long it keeps flowering, but if I get much more I might try to sell some of it too. I let a lot of them go to seed, so I'm hoping even more grows back!

            So, what else is growing? The peas seem to be doing well despite not weeding the garden AT ALL since we planted everything. Seriously. It's super sad and I'm hoping to get around to weeding some more in the next few days when/if it's not raining. We also have onions, carrots, tomatoes, and green beans. Some pumpkins (that the damn chickens didn't get to!) are starting to flower and produce and some of the corn seems to be growing decently for now too.

            Are you sick of my chicken obsession yet? I hope not, because again, no homesteading update would be complete without them! So, this first picture above...Yah. The struggle is real. The chickens have officially taken over the poor cats' area. I'm glad they're not afraid of us or the cats, but between the chicken crap all over the walkway and them ravenously trying to eat the cats' food, it's gotten out of hand. I had to start putting the food bowls in the window sill and a few of the cheakier ladies will still get up there and eat it. (I'm especially talking to you, Gladyss!) Oh. And on top of that they come through and trample all of my chamomile plants and eat the flowers off the pumpkin plants. Sigh...

             These are the Three Amigos. (The two big ones are Brahmas and the other is an Easter Egger.) To be honest, they are my least favorite of all of our chickens because they're the most skittish (which is obviously our fault, for the most part) and they're kind of a-holes. The Easter Egger (Plucky) was picking on the bigger Easter-Egger (Yasmine) for awhile, which isn't cool because she has messed up toes and doesn't like to get around much unless she has to. All three of them come and eat the little ones chicken food as soon as I fill it, which drives me nuts. (The crumbles are supposed to be for the five little ones and the pellets for all the others.)

 Isn't she cute? “Whatcha doin'?”

             I've not given the five little chickies much love besides the super fluffy bantam Silkie I call “Don” on Instagram, so here's a few pics of the others. We somehow have three names for the gray one on top: Lil Chicky (I know. Real creative on my part, huh?), Gandalf, and The Hamburglar. (John came up with the last two. Hamburglar because it's a Silver Hamburg. Hardy har.) She's my new favorite and I've been calling her Gandalf more and more, so female chicken Gandalf it is.

             Live I've said before, I just love watching the Easter Eggers change colors and patterns as they grow. It looks like our two littlest ones are going to be the darker colored variety instead of light like the older two. (Yasmine and Plucky. ;) ) I decided to call this one Amber since she has a lot of dark coloring on her chest. I still need a name for the other Silkie bantam and Easter Egger. Let me know your suggestions in the comments below! I'm obviously open to ridiculous names! (Have I mentioned one of the Australorps is named Australorpennegger?)

            Guess what this stuff is for! I was recently looking into “chicken tractors”. (A caged in area for chickens to clear land.) However, I came across a message board and learned that this can be both detrimental to the land and the chickens, but that pigs are much better at this without affecting their nutrition and the nutrients in the soil. So, we did some more research on using pigs for clearing land and we're deciding to go for it! Since I had some extra money from a sponsored post last month and a lot of the items we need for fencing were on sale at, you guessed it, Rural King, we went ahead and bought all of the supplies we should need for portable, electric fencing.

            We think one pig will be sufficient for our needs, even though there are several areas we'd like to get cleared before next spring planting. Oh. You might be wondering, “Why don't you just till the land you need for planting?” We still don't have a tiller and quite frankly, I can't see us being able to afford one any time soon. Even including the fencing, the cost of purchasing the pig, and having to fix up the old hog shed (which should be free or close to it since we have lots of extra wood and tools), it will still be significantly cheaper to keep a pig than buy a tiller. Like, a fourth of the cost, in fact. Especially since we're cheap and we're making our own fence instead of purchasing one of the pre-made portable electric fences. (Although that might be nice to have in the future!) Maybe I'll do a cost breakdown of that soon too!

            Well, I think that about wraps things up for this time. I could go on about the pigs, but this post is already running long. ;) Until next time...

 

Fun fact: That pile of dirt that shovel is in? That's where our massive, volunteer pumpkin vine is growing!

Click the image above to head to the link-up!

Homeschool Preschool Update: Birds & Bugs, Oh My!

             Hey folks! It's been a long time since I've done a school update for two reasons. 1) I was really slacking there for awhile, but hey. This was kind of my trial year for the real deal coming sooner than I will know it. 2) Other than the alphabet learning stuff I print from various homeschooling blogs I follow and some other workbook-type things I have at home, I mostly use the “A Child's World” curriculum. (You can learn more and order this curriculum for yourself HERE.) Obviously, I didn't want to give everything away about it before so people would purchase it for themselves and help a fellow blogger out, but now that I'm a program ambassador I can! (Well, not everything. ;) )

             I finally got smart and have been letting Myka choose from two or three of the themes which one is most interesting to her when we are getting ready to start a new one. She's really into birds lately, so I wasn't surprised that she chose that one the time before this. Here are some highlights (read: Activities I actually got pictures of!) from the bird theme below.

Myka loves “beading” so the Cheerio “caterpillar” bird treats were a big hit. The birds didn't seem to notice them or enjoy them all that much. Perhaps they don't like Honey Nut Cheerios, which is all we had. Lol

We also practiced numbers 1-5 with this bird egg and “nest” activity. We kind of ran with this one. First, I asked her to put the corresponding egg in the correct numbered nest. Then we practiced some more by putting the correct amount of beads in each egg...Then we put the correct number of beads directly into the “nests”. And so on and so forth. Ha ha She was really into and I try to expand upon things when she's extra interested, especially because her attention span still isn't great, to say the least. I really think the math activities in the curriculum have helped her get a lot better with numbers lately because they make it fun to learn them, plus that's one of the main things she's been interested in learning-wise lately: counting.

We've taken a few nature walks lately, but not nearly enough. We actually got to play in the creek for a decent amount of time this day because it wasn't as buggy! Daddy found some really cool geode rocks, one of which he cracked open, that I forgot to include in today's pictures. We saw our fair share of bugs, too, including lots of damselflies (which are similar to dragonflies), which was good because we started the...

Bug theme next! A lot of people in the old Facebook group for this theme did bugs back in the fall, but I decided to wait until the spring/summer when the “nice bugs” were out. Lol Plus I wanted the weather to be nice so we could release our butterflies after studying them. This was just a swallowtail we found on the way back from playing in the creek. I can't believe it let me get that close! I wasn't zoomed in or anything!

Speaking of butterflies, we got our caterpillars last week and I think I was just as excited about them as Myka was! Lol They take about 5-10 days to make their chysallides and we've had them for 6, so we're eagerly awaiting that. (Btw, it's hard to get a 3 year old to understand that we can't pick the cup up and move it around a bunch so the caterpillars will do their thing and turn into butterflies. You've been warned. Lol)

We did a little flyswatter painting one day, which was entertaining. Two words of advice: 1) Making smacking noises while swatting the flyswatters makes it more fun, evidently. 2) Do yourself a favor and get a 3 pack of flyswatters at the Dollar Store for a buck!

             I was kind of surprised to find our library had a plethora of books on bugs. (Plus it's summer reading program time. Bonus!) I've been trying to get better about reading more in general to the kids. When all else fails, I'll read to Ripley and that usually gets the Jelly Monster interested. Ha ha Whatever works, right? But yah. I also found some fun bug related books that we already have at home, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar. They're actually reading that at our storytime tomorrow too, so hopefully she'll remember and maybe pay better attention too!

             Other than that, we've worked on letter “Q” a little bit more with dot marker pages, colored a caterpillar and ladybug coloring page, and did some scissor practice sheets as well...And we're only about halfway done with all of the bug-related stuff we have! I have more insect learning activities and workbook-type sheets than I can shake a stick bug at! Needless to say, we probably won't do all of them, and that's ok. There will always be more things we can expand upon next year!

             What have your homeschoolers been up to lately? Are you taking a summer break?

You can find this post on Tot School Gathering Place and

13 Tips for Hiking With Kids

             Hey folks! Hiking is one of my favorite pastimes. We haven't done it as much as I would like since we've moved back to Indiana, but I'm hoping to change that soon. However, having two children now instead of just one has definitely presented some new and unique challenges. In spite of the struggles now, I wanted to share some valuable tips if you would like to start getting outdoors/hiking with your little ones too!