Crappie are starting to bite here which means fishing season is just around the corner. We fish A LOT. It’s great family time, relaxing, cheap, and relieves the strain of the food budget. There’s nothing like fresh fish. In my local grocery store, fresh water fish I can catch locally costs between $8.99 and 19.99 per pound! Of course, these are all farm raised fish so in my personal opinion they don’t taste as good as wild fish.
We usually put roughly 100 pounds of fish in the freezer by the end of the season. So that means we’re saving roughly $900-2,000 just by catching them ourselves! One of our secrets is chumming. It’s a cheap way to ‘build’ a fishing hole that provides guaranteed results.
Every die hard fisherman has their own secret chum recipe but we’re pretty basic with ours.
Chum Recipe
You’ll need 5 pounds of milo-based bird seed, 4 packets of dry yeast, 4 cups of sugar, 5 gallon bucket with a lid, and enough water to fill the bucket. This chum recipe is for fermented grain so you’ll definitely want a lid for the bucket and to keep it in an area you’re not going to smell it.
- Bloom the yeast in a couple cups of warm water.
- Dump the bird seed into the bucket and add the sugar and activated yeast.
- Fill the bucket the rest of the way with warm water.
- Wait an hour and add additional water to fill the bucket.
- You’ll know the chum is ready when it quits ‘cooking’ and releasing gas bubbles. Depending on the temperature this can be a couple days up to a few weeks.
Tips: Check the water and burp the bucket daily. The grain will soak up a lot of water so you’ll have to add more throughout the process. It’s important that you burp the bucket since the grain will be fermenting and producing gases. Otherwise, it’ll pop the lid itself and make a mess. DO NOT USE MEAT. I can’t stress this enough. It’ll make the chum go from a strong beer smell to rancid meat and will attract flies. When it’s just the grain, flies aren’t that attracted to it.
You can use basically any grain for this recipe, but milo seems to work the best in my area. It’s small enough that the fish can’t fill up on it quickly and pretty cheap. We actually get the scoop outs from local farmers. It’s the grain residue that’s left in the truck when they dump it. It’s usually dirty so is considered waste. The most we’ve paid for milo scoop out is $5 for 50 gallons of the stuff, but usually farmers just give it away if you’ll clean it out of the truck.
To Use, scatter a few cups in the fishing hole you’re building. We usually bait it well the first day and every day or so go back and toss a few more cups of chum out. The water is a great attractant too. One thing we do is mill the grain down after it’s fermented and make a slurry. It puts the scent in the water but doesn’t actually feed the fish.
This chum attracts pretty much every species where I live. First come in the perch and minnows, then the bass, and finally the catfish. Chum isn’t legal to use everywhere so be sure to check your local restrictions before using.
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