Cumberland has long been home to a rare breed of human inhabitant as well: the billionaire class. Various Rockefellers and Candlers (Coca-Cola heirs from Atlanta) had winter homes on the island, but the main landowner was the Carnegie family. In the late 19th century, the Carnegies built a 59-room mansion with multiple pools, a golf course and 200 servants. This burned down in the 1950s, and much of the Carnegie land was later turned over to the National Park Service. But their descendants still own a few plots, including the site of Greyfield Inn, a 13-room luxury hotel (the only lodging on the island), where Monica Ponce and Russell Honderd count themselves among the luckiest of small farmers. 

The Atlanta couple managed several farms around Georgia before taking the helm of Greyfield’s one-acre garden, which keeps the inn’s decadent restaurant supplied with produce. Their other farming gigs didn’t require a 45-minute boat ride to the nearest post office. And they didn’t come with perks like a salary, a 40-hour work week and benefits—unheard of for upstart organic farmers.

“We used to spend our weekends selling at farmer’s markets. Here we have a built-in market: the kitchen,” says Ponce.

“It’s the best agricultural job in Georgia,” Honderd adds, plucking an orange and slicing it open for me as we wander through the gardens.

I’d come to Cumberland for a mid-winter retreat. The first morning, as I walked from my cottage to the main inn building for breakfast, I passed a small white horse—not a foal, but not quite an adult—ambling through the mist beneath an oak tree with a trunk the diameter of a hot tub, its branches curling down to the ground in a sprawling canopy the size of a three-bedroom home.

Photo by Brian Barth.

I quickly learned that such surreal scenes are the standard backdrop on Cumberland. In summer, giant sea turtles lay their eggs on the beach, the hatchlings emerging by the thousands in the moonlight. Armadillos are found rooting for insects along nearly every trail, with scarcely any concern for hikers passing a few feet away. The horses are just as bold, paying me no attention as they pass me on the island’s sandy paths, on their way to who-knows-what sort of horse business.

The horses are territorial when it comes to others, however, forming herds that the alpha stallions will defend to their death. One herd lives on the land around Greyfield Inn, where the workers have given them names like Bonecrusher and Bandit. Jack, the head of the herd, had a dustup with an insurgent stallion not long before I arrived.

“Jack kicked it in the head and killed it right there in the middle of the lawn,” says Honderd, pointing to the spot. The inn’s well-to-do patrons—rooms start at $625/night, food and private ferry ride included; jacket required for men at dinner—were horrified. 

“It’s like Jurassic Park out here,” Ponce adds, pointing to a marshy spot a couple of hundred feet away where she informs me two alligators reside.

The inn, which is still owned by Carnegie descendants, was once known as a stuffy place where old-money southerners go—the décor is still heavy on taxidermy—but it’s recently become a bit more hip, thanks largely to Whitney Otawka, the tattooed young chef who took over the dining program in 2015. Otawka, who trained with Hugh Acheson at Five & Ten in Athens, Georgia, and later rose to notoriety as a Top Chef contestant, recently published The Saltwater Table, a cookbook themed on the island-to-table cuisine for which she’s become famous.

Otawka incorporates lemongrass, coconut milk and Caribbean spices in her food, along with local sheepshead fish and celery microgreens, which I nibble for the first time as Ponce and Honderd walk me through their greenhouse. The warm winter sun soothes my Toronto snow-weary bones. What an idyllic life, I tell them. But that’s not necessarily the case when you work outside year-round, they tell me. Winter is lovely, but by March, the sand gnats come out. Then come the ticks that cling to each other by the thousands in little writhing balls, waiting for you to pass on the trail. By mid-spring, the mosquito swarms have set in.

“And then, once it hits 90 degrees, you start getting the big mosquitoes that can bite through jeans. Then the biting flies come,” says Honderd. “You can almost tell the temperature by what’s trying to suck your blood.” Paradise is forever fleeting.

The post These Lucky Farmers Tend a Garden on an Isolated Georgia Island appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Herb spirals were popularized decades ago by the permaculture movement, a subculture focused on communal living and self-sufficiency. There’s a vague notion about saving space (vertical growing!) and creating different ecological niches (south side for son-loving herbs, north side for those that like it a bit more shady and cool, such as mint). But the main appeal to permaculture hippies seems to be the groovy spiral design. 

Preparation

You can easily have your own groovy spiral planter. Select a flat location that receives at least six hours of sun. In theory, an herb spiral can be as big as you want it, but typically they’re about 6 feet in diameter. Remove the existing vegetation or smother it with a layer of cardboard so that weeds and grass don’t grow up into the spiral later.

Materials

Bricks, cinder blocks and decorative concrete wall blocks have flat surfaces that make them easy to stack into a sturdy bed. Natural stone is also an option, although you may want to avoid it if you don’t have prior experience with stone masonry, as the irregular surfaces make it difficult to work with. You’ll also need bagged or bulk topsoil. Use the formula for the volume of a cone to determine how many cubic feet of soil you need: (π x R2 x H)/3. The height (H) is typically half the radius (R), although you can go up to the full radius if you want a steeper, more dramatic spiral.

Construction

If you want to get professional about it, spread a bed of paver sand or fine gravel as a base to help you stack the building materials perfectly level (not needed if you’re using natural stone). Otherwise, the finished product might look a little crooked and the blocks may settle unevenly, but this is only an aesthetic issue. Mark the shape of the spiral on the ground with spray paint or flour (three coils is good for a six-foot-diameter bed) and lay one row of stone or blocks along this path. Continue laying additional rows, making each one shorter than the last so that the bed slopes gradually upward as the spiral curls inward. Fill the bed with soil as you build it—no need to use mortar or cement, as the earth will hold the blocks/stone in place. Water thoroughly and then top off the soil after it has settled. Then you’re ready to plant.

The post How to Build an Herb Spiral appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“As the war ended, and lawns took over American backyards, those earnest posters of cheery home gardeners and fierce-looking vegetables became a relic of wartime scarcity—until a few weeks ago,” said the New York Times during the first week of spring.

In Modern Farmer’s humble opinion, growing food at home is always a good idea, crisis or not. If you’re in a hurry to get a garden in before spring flies by, here are a few ideas about how to do it quickly and cheaply. The good news is that nurseries and garden centers have been designated as essential businesses in most places, so you should have access to the necessary supplies.

Strawbale Garden

Strawbales serve as quick and easy raised beds, allowing you to grow food wherever you have sun, whether on concrete, a lawn or hard-packed bare earth. Be sure to use bales of straw, not hay, as the latter contains seeds that can sprout and become weeds. Place the bales with the cut ends of the straw facing up and water them until they are soggy. Each day for 10 days, apply a generous dusting of all-purpose organic fertilizer to the top of each bale and water thoroughly. This accelerates the decomposition of the straw into a rich and fertile growing medium. Then spread a two-inch layer of topsoil on the bales. You may plant seeds directly in the soil. For seedlings, use a trowel to gouge out little holes in the straw and add some extra soil to fill those holes as you plant each one.

Milk Crate Garden

Just like strawbale gardening, this approach allows you to plant a garden on concrete or other surfaces that are unsuitable for growing vegetables—except it’s even easier. The hardest part is finding used milk crates (try putting a wanted ad on Craigslist if you get stuck). Cut pieces of burlap big enough to line the inside of each crate (about four feet by four feet usually works). Fill the crates with potting soil and boom! You’re ready to plant.

Sheet Mulch Garden

This method turns a lawn or a weed patch into an instant garden. Simply spread a two- to three-inch layer of compost over the area, water deeply and cover with a layer of cardboard (remove any tape as it is not biodegradable). Then cover the cardboard with a layer of wood chips or straw mulch (starved for light, the vegetation will decompose; but the cardboard pieces should overlap at least six inches to discourage vigorous weeds from snaking through). To plant perennial herbs, shrubs, trees and vines, push back the mulch and cut a hole in the cardboard as big as the pot. Do the same for vegetable seedlings, but mound 6 to 8 inches of topsoil under the cardboard where you wish to plant. Sowing seeds isn’t an option with sheet mulching, and the method is a bit clumsy for small seedlings, such as lettuce. But it’s an effective way to plant seedlings of larger plants such as tomatoes, cucumbers and squash.

The post How to Jumpstart your COVID-19 Victory Garden appeared first on Modern Farmer.

While waiting for the apocalypse, preppers have needed to continue to make a living, and some have done so by authoring websites and YouTube channels for teaching survival skills. What was once a quaint cottage industry of homemade DVDs and conspiracy theory ranting has blossomed into a multi-billion-dollar industry selling all the goods you’re going to need to survive. Prepper products are increasingly available at non-prepper sites, from Amazon to Nordstrom’s, and are touted by mainstream influencers, including the Kardashians.

Business has been more than brisk since the coronavirus crisis began. “We are getting Black Friday levels of traffic almost every day,” one prepper executive told Wired. Here’s a sampling of what’s on offer—but act quickly: The shelves at online prepper stores are increasingly empty.

“Bug Out” Bags

In prepper-speak, to “bug out” means to run for the hills, or wherever you end up running to when the SHTF. A bug out bag is what you bring with you. Ready to grab at a moment’s notice, it should be stocked with everything you need to be self-sufficient for the first days of the apocalypse—food, water, shelter, N95 masks—buying you time to prepare for long-term survival. This model from Echo-Sigma, available in brown, red and black for around $600, includes a tent, sleeping bag, first-aid kit, knife, hand-crank radio/flashlight and a week’s worth of food and water.

Food Buckets

Unless you’re prepared to forage from the land, consider stocking up on freeze-dried food, which prepper sites tend to sell by the bucket. A dozen buckets with 19 different menu items from Survival Cave Food—the company says it’s a year’s supply for one person—will set you back around $4,000. With a 20-year shelf life, you’ll be set with “Fluffy Scrambled Eggs” and “Refreshing Orange Drink” as the world burns.

Pre-Fab Bunkers

You might wish to stockpile your food buckets and other supplies in a safety shelter, such as a Swisher ESP (Emergency Security Preparedness) model, which range from the size of a walk-in closet to a small bedroom. Currently available at Sam’s Club (the largest models run north of $10,000), they are available with a built-in gun rack and, in case of extreme weather, have been tested to withstand the impact of a 2-by-4 moving at 100 miles per hour. 

Water Filters

You may want to stock up on bottled water (prepper sites usually offer it in cans—longer shelf life), but the hardcore among us are prepared to make any water source drinkable. At the low end, a LifeStraw ($12) will let you sip safely from most lakes and streams. But if you need water for the whole family, consider this hand-powered system ($550, ebay) that pumps out 90 gallons per hour and fits in the included backpack for easy transport.

Hunting and Gathering Supplies

If the going gets really rough, you may need to tap mother nature’s larder. Prepper sites are replete with information on wild nuts and berries you can eat, plus tutorials on how to skin a squirrel. Guns (for both hunting and self-defense) are ubiquitous in prepper culture, but if bullets aren’t your thing, you can still prepare by learning to fish, trap and eat roadkill. If it gets down to subsisting on rodents, you might find yourself wishing you had a “slingbow”—”there has never been a more adjustable and stable shooting platform,” says bugoutroll.ca, which offers the product for $75.

The post In Praise of Preppers appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Start Early
It’s best to plant fruit trees in late winter or early spring before they emerge from dormancy. During this time, they may be purchased “bare root”—sans soil, that is—from mail order nurseries. How early you can plant depends on where you live, but it’s essentially a matter of the ground no longer being frozen. Give the nursery your ZIP code and they will tell you the earliest window that it’s safe to ship the tree.

Find the Right Spot
Fruit trees need a minimum of six hours of sun, and ideally eight hours or more. Soil that drains quickly after a rain is essential; otherwise, fungal diseases are likely to set in. Microclimate is extremely important. Heat-loving fruits such as peaches work best against a south-facing wall that will amplify the sun’s rays. Species such as cherries that require a high degree of “winter chill”—a horticultural term for the number of hours below 45 degrees that some fruits require each season in order to produce—are best with a cooler northern exposure.

Dig the Perfect Hole
Bare root trees don’t need a huge hole. It just needs to be big enough to hold the roots. More important than size is to create a planting environment that keeps the tree from sinking into the ground, which often occurs as loose soil settles beneath it, leading to moist soil around the base of the trunk—a common mistake that promotes disease. Dig only as deep as the roots are long and then form a cone of soil in the center of the hole over which the roots can splay. This provides support to keep the trunk from sinking later on (pack the cone of soil with your feet so that it doesn’t settle). Most fruit trees are grafted about eight inches above the root system—orient the tree so that the graft “wound” (the knobby area where the cut was made) faces north, where this weak link in the trunk will not be exposed to the scalding sun. Fill the hole with the remaining excavated soil and then use a heavy stream of water from a hose to wash it into place around the roots, helping to eliminate air pockets.

Set It Up for Success
After planting, dig a broad, shallow basin in a four-foot diameter donut shape around the tree, forming a low berm on the outside edge of the donut to capture rainwater and encourage it to percolate into the root zone. Spread a two-inch layer of compost over the donut area, followed by a two-inch layer of wood chip mulch on top (but don’t pile it directly against the trunk). This blanket of organic matter will feed the roots for years to come, while buffering them from heat and drought. Finally, pound a pair of stout wooden stakes into the ground on either side of the tree and tie the trunk to the stakes so that your young sapling doesn’t blow over in high winds (use old pieces of garden hose or plastic tubing over the rope or wire where it contacts the trunk to protect it from chafing). After two years, the tree should have a strong enough root system to hold its own and the stakes may be removed.

The post How to Plant a Fruit Tree appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Less Stress
Planting is a fundamentally stressful experience for plants, because their roots get disturbed in the process. They cannot immediately absorb water or nutrients, leading to what horticulturalists term “transplant shock.” The hotter the weather, the worse the shock. But planting when a plant is fully dormant eliminates this issue.

Establishes Faster
Fruit trees are often slow growing, taking three years or more to begin bearing a crop. If you plant them in spring or summer, they typically languish for the first growing season, adding a full year until you can enjoy the harvest. But if planted while dormant, trees emerge from their winter slumber ready to grow, none the wiser to having been uprooted from the nursery and plunked down in some stranger’s yard.

Leads to a Long, Healthy Life
Fruit trees raised in a pot develop root systems that coil around and around in the shape of their container, which is not what nature intended. Trees grown for bare root planting, however, are typically grown in the ground in mild-winter climes such as California, where they are gently uprooted and shipped off to customers. Their roots splay out naturally when you plant them, which is important for healthy growth and to anchor the tree in high winds. When the roots are coiled, however, they tend to keep growing in a circle after planting, leading to a weak foundation—a big problem for a plant you hope will live to see your grandchildren swinging from its limbs.

Easier to Plant
The old saying that you need to dig a $100 hole for a $10 tree doesn’t apply to bare root trees. When planting potted trees, it is wise to dig a hole several times the size of the root ball, so those poor coiled roots have an easy time spreading out in the soil. But bare root trees only require a hole as big as the root system, which in their case is usually wider than deep, saving your back. 

Cheaper
Bare root trees tend to cost less than half of what potted trees go for, because pots and soil cost money, and because it’s more economical for growers to produce a tree on farmland and ship it to customers, rather than paying staff to take care of it while it sits in a retail nursery on expensive urban real estate.

The post Fruit Trees in the Nude appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“What the hell! What is that! Mom?” says a voice in the video, as something that looks like a cross between a tadpole, a dragonfly and an alien writhes around on the wooden dock. “Holy shit! What the hell is that?” she yells in response. “What is happening?” says the son, as though he has suddenly found himself in the Twilight Zone.

The internet exploded with theories about the nature of the beast, but it turned out there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. Marine biologists identified it as a juvenile specimen of clearnose skate, a fairly common cousin of the manta ray, which apparently looks rather spooky during its awkward prepubescent phase. 

Another result of the viral video: Fishermen around the world began posting all sorts of weird things they’d caught on social media. Lobstermen in Maine recently reeled in a deer, still living, that had been swept offshore. In Indiana, an angler hooked a live grenade; authorities called in a bomb squad to remove it. Fishbrain.com, a popular social media site catering to the fishing community, was flooded with stories and photos of items lured from the murky depths—including a pair of underwear and what one contributor described as “a bag of fish and cow parts.”

Here are five other bycatch oddities submitted to the site:

1. Chris Schultz from Canada caught a decapitated tuna head:

2. Mustapha Abdulwahab from Australia caught a coffee machine:

3. Mike Wittmer from California caught a dragonfly:

4. Travis Vidaurri from Texas caught a bullfrog:

5. Daniel Sloan from the USA caught a snapping turtle:

The post 5 Weird Things Fishermen Have Caught appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Stoner Farm Crime

Using dogs, electric fencing and guns, backwoods pot growers have long protected their patches from crooks looking to poach their buds. Marijuana thieves range from professional criminals to teenagers looking to get high. But among those inclined to this particular crime niche, it seems not everyone got the message that hemp is now legal. In the last couple of years, farmers have begun to grow industrial hemp—incapable of getting anyone high and nowhere near as valuable as marijuana—on a large scale. And a surprising number of those farmers have recently reported dead-of-night thefts, some counting losses up to $2 million, with police reporting that the perpetrators in most cases believed they were carrying out a marijuana heist.

Klobuchar in Big Ag’s Pocket?

Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator from Minnesota who is running for president, has made the case that a Midwestern, farm-country candidate such as herself has the best chance of beating Trump in November. It’s a centrist message intended to appeal to the widest possible demographic, including, she hopes, some of the rural voters who helped propel him into office. But, of course, there are trade-offs to playing the centrist game. For starters, one becomes vulnerable to being co-opted by corporate interests, from which, it seems, Klobuchar has not shied away. It turns out she’s particularly cozy with the food-ag conglomerate Cargill: Klobuchar’s campaign has accepted nearly $30,000 from the company’s PAC, about five times more than any other presidential candidate, according to the Daily Beast.

Chileans Actually Follow Health Advice on Food Labels

Pretty much everyone knows that consuming a lot of refined sugar is bad for you, just like we all know cigarettes and alcohol cause a host of grave health issues. Alcohol and cigarettes have long been subject to warning labels, but four years ago, the government of Chile extended that concept to sugary drinks and other unhealthy foods, which now bear large-print messages on the front of the package. Researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill looked at consumption of the newly labeled foods 18 months after the rules went into effect and found that Chileans were drinking 25 percent less sugary drinks per capita. The moral of the story? It seems it’s not enough to just know what’s bad for us—we need to be reminded of it in the moment we’re reaching for a box of Cap’n Crunch in the grocery store aisle. A number of other countries are now following Chile’s lead. The US is not among them.

POTUS vs WOTUS

American farmers voted for Donald Trump in droves, and apparently they have no regrets. In January, Trump spoke once again at the American Farm Bureau’s annual convention—he is the only sitting president to have done so—where he congratulated himself for all the things he’s done for farmers. Chief among these “accomplishments” was rolling back former President Barack Obama’s Waters of the US, or WOTUS, rule, which extended Clean Water Act protections to landscapes that were not previously under this regulatory umbrella, including a fair bit of farmland. This news was met with huge cheers by the conservative farmer crowd at the convention, folks who don’t like the EPA meddling in their affairs. His approval rating among farmers is now at 83 percent, the highest since he took office. They also cheered Trump’s trade deal with China, which was intended to restore the purchase of American soybeans and alleviate the intense financial pressure that many farmers are under.

The post Stoner Crime, WOTUS, POTUS, and More: Your February Food News Round-Up appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“It was an abrupt change that made the rule significantly weaker,” says Jaclyn Lopez, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, a group that had worked closely with the NOAA on the 2016 rule. She says the original rule was the product of years of negotiation involving the shrimp industry, environmental groups and concerned citizens. “The agency has an obligation to have a transparent decision-making process, but this was not vetted publicly.”

Turtle exclusion devices, or TEDs, have long been required on certain types of shrimp trawlers. Essentially a big metal grate that shunts large objects such as turtles out of a shrimper’s net while allowing the shrimp to enter, TEDs were first developed in the 1970s as a practical, inexpensive solution to the problem. Shrimpers didn’t see it that way, however. While studies have routinely found that TEDs result in the loss of no more than two to five percent of the catch, shrimpers claim the numbers are much higher and have fought TED rules tooth and nail for decades.

The new NOAA rule would have required TEDs on more types of trawlers, covering an estimated 5,800 additional boats and saving around 2,500 turtles annually. The revised requirements cover only about 1,000 shrimp boats. The Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups are gearing up for a potential legal challenge. It’s a fight they’ve been through before.

“We fought for ten years just to get the 2016 rule,” says Lopez.

At times, the shrimper-turtle fight has gotten ugly. When the first TED rules were set to go into effect in 1989, more than 500 shrimp boats blockaded ports and shipping channels along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana. Some raised skull-and-crossbones  flags atop their masts and rammed Coast Guard vessels, summoned to disperse the blockade, with their trawlers. At one point, shots were fired. The Coast Guard, fearing for its employees’ safety, advised its officers not to wear their uniforms in public.

Historically, sea turtles have nested in enormous numbers along the coast of the southeastern United States. These jaw-dropping creatures, some weighing more than 1,000 pounds with a lifespan of a century or more, return to the beach where they were born to lay eggs. The rest of the year they live entirely in the ocean, swimming across the Atlantic to Africa and back, using a mysterious, little-understood inner compass to guide their migration back to where they began their lives.

Sea turtles are extraordinarily robust in their armored shells, but they become vulnerable as they swim ashore each year in summer to lay their eggs. Shrimp nets, their greatest threat, were responsible for more than 10,000 sea turtle deaths annually in the Southeast during the 1980s. Sea turtles must periodically surface to breathe; they drown if trapped inside a net for long enough, their carcasses often washing ashore.

Tempers eventually settled down in 1989. But as the blockades disbanded, the sea turtle-shrimper conflict devolved into more of a cold war: Industry lobbyists fought to dilute the rules, while enforcement remained lax (for a time, Louisiana prohibited its fisheries officers from enforcing the federal TED rules).

For decades, environmentalists have worked to get TED devices on every shrimp boat operating in the Southeast, where the nation’s shrimp industry is concentrated. Sea turtle numbers have rebounded somewhat, but progress has been painfully slow. All of the sea turtle species that inhabit the waters of the southeast remain either endangered or threatened.

The old TED regulations applied only to larger shrimp boats that operate in deep water. The intention of the 2016 rule was to cast a wider net, requiring smaller boats that operate closer to shore to use them as well. But the Trump administration’s revised rule says that only boats longer than 40 feet must use TEDs.

Smaller boats were already subject to a rule that requires fishermen to check their nets for trapped turtles every 55 minutes, as turtles only drown when held underwater for longer. But it’s unclear how effective that rule has been in saving turtles. Shrimp boats are periodically boarded by inspectors, but one study found that only 35 percent of fisherman complied with the 55-minute rule—and these were fisherman who knew they were being observed, says Lopez. In other words, many in the industry openly flaunted the rules, which makes one wonder what the compliance rates are like when inspectors aren’t present.

Lopez says the 2016 rule bringing TED requirements to smaller boats was especially momentous, as the industry has moved increasingly toward the use of smaller boats since the original TED rule went into effect 40 years ago. The decision to change the rule appears to have occurred behind closed doors—environmental groups, anyway, were not at the table, to her knowledge. The Center for Biological Diversity has put in a Freedom of Information Act request to view all NOAA documents pertaining to the rule from 2016 onwards, in hopes of shedding light on what happened. Were there meetings with shrimp lobbyists? Was there a directive from higher up?

The course of action it takes will depend on what it finds. This may include suing the government for not adequately enforcing the Endangered Species Act—the course of action that brought about the 2016 rule in the first place. In the meantime, the center may have to sue to get access to those documents, says Lopez. “They are supposed to respond to FOIA requests within 20 days”—it’s already been more than 20 days and so far nothing—”but we’ve found with this administration that, unfortunately, we often need to litigate in order to get a response.”

Legal action is not the only available tool—consumer pressure can have even more of an impact. When news broke in 2013 that Louisiana was refusing to enforce turtle-safe shrimping practices in its waters, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch (widely regarded by retailers as the gold standard for rating sustainable seafood) red-listed shrimp from the state, causing a significant drop in sales. The impact on shrimper’s livelihoods was sufficiently damaging to the coastal economy that the state was forced to begin enforcing the rules.

“The budget for enforcement, or even the political will for enforcement, is often very low,” explains Lopez. But shrimpers are “very concerned about getting a bad rap from the Monterey Bay Aquarium,” she adds. The lesson? Consumers are the ultimate enforcers.

The post Shrimpers vs. Sea Turtles: The War Continues appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The Gear

The most important piece of equipment is a giant drill called an auger—this is how you access the ice under the water. These are typically six inches in diameter or larger; they’re expensive, but you can try to rent one if you’re not ready to take the plunge. 

You won’t be using a typical rod. Instead, there are two main approaches: a short ice-fishing rod (these are incredibly basic compared to the standard rod—you can get by with tying your line to a 30-inch broom handle), plus multiple “tip-ups,” which are small frames that straddle the hole and are outfitted with a flag that swivels up when you have a bite (how many of tip-ups each person can use depends on local regulations). 

Otherwise, most of your gear (except safety gear, clothing and an optional ice shanty—see below for these) will be identical to any other fishing trip: bait/lures, tackle box, stool, bucket, cooler, fillet knife, and so on. You will also need a seasonal permit.

The Methods

During the summer, it is common to fish the shallows, but in winter, fish often congregate in deeper water. Typically, one drills numerous holes over a large area (but within eyesight of each other) that are worked simultaneously. At the main hole where you keep your supplies, jig with your rod, trying out various depths. At the other holes, set up your tip-ups. These are typically aimed at big fish who trawl along the bottom; setting the bait about one foot above the lake bed is recommended. When you see a flag pop up, run over and pull up the line. Any cold-water fish inhabiting a given lake in summer should also be there in winter.

Staying Warm

Obviously, you need to layer like crazy. Assume there will be wind; add an extra wind-proof layer over what you would normally wear to stay outdoors for hours on end at whatever temperature is forecast. Insulated boots are a must, as are two pairs of gloves: heavy mitts for when you’re sitting around, plus a pair of “liner” gloves underneath for when you need to do stuff with your fingers. Snow goggles are highly recommended. 

To make it easier, many folks use ice fishing shanties that they tow out onto the lake and leave all winter long. These can be outfitted with heaters and cooking stoves; some people are known to bring generators and set up a TV. In regions where ice fishing is popular, you can rent a shanty by the hour.

Safety

Drowning in freezing water is no way to go. If you don’t know what you’re doing, the first rule is to go with someone who does (and never go by yourself). While ice as thin as two inches can support a human, the ice on frozen lakes is never a uniform thickness—it might be three inches in one area while only one inch thick in another. 

If there is any question as to thickness, drill a hole near the edge with a cordless drill and measure it: Be safe and don’t venture out unless it’s at least four inches thick where you drill. Most folks bring a metal rod to tap the ice in front of them as they walk; a hollow sound is a bad sign, while a sharp rapping noise usually means that the ice is firm. Always bring a flotation device and a rope in the event that someone falls through. 

Where to Go

If you live in the right climate, go where the locals go. (Hint: Ask around at tackle shops.) Otherwise, you’ll have to travel. In some cold-climate locales, especially scenic ones, you’ll find a minor industry devoted to ice fishing tourism. Places such as Banff, Alaska, and Scandinavia have no shortage of professional ice fishing guides that will take you on the trip of a lifetime—food, shanty, and gear included. Peruse fishingbooker.com for chartered trips. Iceshanty.com is the Internet’s main hub for ice fishing information, sharing advice, and connecting with fellow enthusiasts.

The post The Modern Farmer Guide to Ice Fishing appeared first on Modern Farmer.