Loadin' the boat

We took Mr. O on his first fishing trip on Memorial day and had a great time. How is this related to suburban homesteading you might ask - well, before going fishing we had to dig up some worms for bait and there's no better place to do that than in the garden. So dig we did you dig?




Pepper plants are looking pretty good, eh? We harvested a nice haul of worms including one that I swear was half snake - it was huge. By far the biggest worm I've seen in these parts. Take a look at this mess of worms we dug up. A neat thing I noticed while digging was how many worm castings were evident in the soil. The castings are sort of hard to describe if you haven't seen them before. Picture a piece of poop about the size a worm would produce and you'll have a pretty good idea. I keep forgetting that this is the internet - here's a nice picture of worm castings.

With more than enough bait collected we headed out to Lake Raleigh, a 90 acre lake on NC State's Centennial Campus that only allows non-motorized boats. A great thing about the lake is that it's about 5 minutes from the farm - can't beat that.

We shoved off in the canoe and headed for a nice pocket along the bank that looked like it would have lots of fish. Once we cast our worm rig close enough to the bank it was fish after fish. Mr. O was very into counting his fish. He counted up to 16 fish, then 18, then back down to 16. I'm not really sure what the final count was but of course that doesn't matter. I will note that his first official fish reeled in was a largemouth bass - didn't get a good picture of it because it was ony about 3.5 inches long. But here he is reelin' in a big one.

Of course they weren't that big, but they were real fish that he caught and got to touch and hold and let go and that was a neat thing to watch. I was surprised at how readily he touched the fish and even how he was fine with letting them go. Here he is practicing catch and release.

We even took some videos with the camera that I'll try to post here. Let's see if this works.

Well it seems to be there. Check out his laugh near the end - too funny. Obviously the trip was a success. I think we were only out for about 2 hours - just enough time to get out and have fun without overdoing it. Though it did make him a little tired. He fell sound asleep on our five minute drive back to the farm. We didn't use anywhere near all the worms we collected so we deposited all of the remaining ones, including the big boy, back into the garden.

Chicken update - we got five eggs today. The first time that all five hens laid in one day. One of the Silver Phoenix eggs was much bigger than any I'd previously seen. I was thinking that their eggs would probably start to get bigger once they reached full maturity and today's egg seems to confirm that.