Jar11591

Blistered some shishito peppers fresh from the garden. Delicious.

According to that link the record has been confirmed? Oh my gosh. Can’t even wrap my head around that. A 12 pound largemouth caught just an hour and a half west of me. The NYS LM record is something I thought would never fall.

@gimruis yeah, we’re currently at the “giving them away“ stage. We’ve pickled them, made cucumber salads, cucumber water, and just snack on them. Now our friends and family are getting the surplus. Tomorrow another 2-3 will be ready that yesterday we’re just flowers. The growth rate is just insane. These guys are growing really fast too. And they are delicious. This particular garden bed which is the same as the cucumber, we covered in plastic over the winter. It seems to have supercharged the soil. Whole garden is thriving, but this particular bed seems like it’s on steroids.

Turn The Page by Bob Seger/Metallica. Metallica’s version made Seger’s version unlistenable.

@ol'crickety don’t want to speak for @gimruis but I’m assuming it’s a remote control for an electric motor.

Every few days we get this: Hundreds of tomatoes almost ready to start ripening. I’m salivating.

@casts_by_fly looks perfect

For a state record, I couldn't care less about recognition. I do care about keeping my fishing spots my fishing spots. They already get busy enough. I’m turning the fat girl loose and immediately having an asthma attack.

Definitely my favorite place on the net.

Got a grub problem in my garden. I noticed my carrots were stunted, so I went throw the soil and pulled out hundreds of big nasty grubs. Think I’m gonna go the beneficial nematodes route to eradicate them. Constant war with critters, home ownership is!

We successfully evicted the groundhog from our yard, but he still lives close. He hasn’t been as destructive this year but he has decimated a dozen heads of lettuce, 3 green bean plants, the kale, and the cabbage. Not as bad as last year, but enough to bum me out. My girlfriend and I still have some options left to prevent it, but I’m learning to just appreciate the ecosystem I’ve created in its entirety, ground hogs and all. My goal is to just grow more than he can eat. We have a lot of rabbits as well, but they usually stick to the clover we planted. Which is part of the reason we planted it so as long as the dogs don’t catch the baby bunnies, they’re always welcome in the yard.

@ol'crickety thank you. It’s my pride and joy. Gardening is a lot like bass fishing for me. Whereas I’ll always find an excuse to mess with my fishing gear even when I’m not fishing, I’ll look for any excuse to go hang out in my garden and tend to the plants. Just me and the bumblebees….plus the ground hog looking longingly at my green beans from the bushes.

Love the garden pics. Our garden has exploded this year. Already harvesting cucumbers, we also planted 4 types of tomatoes, 3 kinds of peppers, carrots, scallions, leeks, chives, green beans, lettuce, kale, cabbage, thyme, oregano, cannabis, dill, basil, rosemary, cilantro, parsley, lemongrass and probably forgetting some. Also the second year of our blackberry bush that has hundreds of flowers on it already and the first batch of berries has started to ripen. We gambled by moving our seedlings outside in late April and it payed off as we never got another frost and we’re weeks ahead of last year.

If all else is equal, casting, easily.

@TnRiver46 how do you cook them? If it wasn’t so expensive and if I had a more convenient way to source, it would replace chicken for me easily. To me it’s like a combination of pork and chicken. It has the rich fattiness and tenderness of pork but still that poultry flavor.

My duck connect came through (my dad bought some at the farmers’ market and gave me a bunch). I cooked up some legs tonight. Slow cooked them for a couple hours, then seared them in a pan to get the skin super crispy. Then I made a red wine and duck fat-reduction to go over it. Brown sugar-glazed carrots and wild rice on the side. Ate like a king tonight. Duck is about the tastiest meat out there.

@Pat Brown if I can make a slight correction, The Nature of Fishing isn’t Paul Rogers, but rather BR user @Paul Roberts. And that reminds me, he’d probably be on my Mt. Rushmore as well. His YouTube channel is second to none when it comes to the biology of micropterus.

Bill Dance Shaw Grigsby Kevin Van Dam My dad

Those pumpkinseeds will eat a bare Aberdeen hook if it’s in front of them. Voracious little guys. I remember as a kid, my friends and I challenging each other with who could catch one on a weirder bait. Wood chip, chewing gum, and dandelion heads as well as bare hooks are some of the things I remember catching pumpkinseeds on. They are about the prettiest fish that swim, too. I love targeting them on dry flies.

Is the stocking of largemouth bass popular down where you are? In NYS, the DEC stocks zero bass in any water. In fact I’ve never even heard of water being stocked with bass of any kind. They stock trout, because they often can’t reproduce, and also muskie and walleye whose populations can be a bit finicky. But bass up here are 100% self sustaining and apart from some minor regulations, the DEC is completely hands off of anything related to bass.

Sparse grass with rock and light timber in 1-8’ of water? Easy choice. Jig.

Most of the time I go out with the mindset of “if I fish where I know bass are and I catch enough of them, odds are some of them will be sizable”. There are times though such as very early or late in the season where I will specifically target big bass with the mindset of “gotta be prepared to get skunked”.

Don’t wait on a hookset. Bass can inhale and then reject a bait much faster than we can even realize it happened. Waiting on a hookset is just giving bass more time to reject a bait. When you feel the hit, drop the rod, reel up the slack, and let em have it as fast as you can. You will never have to wait on a bass. They’re faster than you.

Dobyns FR735. I believe it still retails for under $150, and if not it can definitely be found on sale under that. It makes a great frog rod, and a decent punching rod. Mine is on full time frog duty and it really excels.