When you are fishing, you can substitute cheese balls, bread balls or pieces of sausage meat for live bait. A bit of frayed aluminium foil makes a convincing minnow.
Ensure a steady supply of bait by starting your own worm farm. Line a wooden box 2-3ft/600-900mm long with leaves and grass and fill it halfway with soil. Add another layer of dry grass and leaves and 1 pint/570ml or so of compost, coffee grounds and vegetables that rot quickly, chopped together. Top with a final layer of leaves and wet the mixture down before adding the worms. Feed the worms monthly with compost and sour milk and they'll multiply rapidly.
If you keep maggots for a few days, they will turn into chrysalises, or casters, which are good as hook bait.
Alternatively, place a large wet sack on a grassy area for a few days. Keep the sack moist. When you lift it there will be worms on the under surface. Collect them quickly - they will burrow below the ground very fast.
Garden worms can be collected in the early morning from grassy areas, particularly if there has been a heavy down-pour in the night. Or you can collect them at night with a torch.
Grubs and meal worms also make good bait. You can raise mealworms by filling a jar three-quarters full of flour mixed with sawdust. Put in the meal worms arid punch tiny holes in the lid. Don't be surprised when you see that the mealworms, which are actually beetle larvae, have matured inside the jar into full-grown beetles. They will, in turn, produce more mealworms.
Freeze unused minnows. But don't defrost them completely when you use them again or they'll be too soggy to stay on your hook.
Other, less usual baits include sweetcorn kernels, for use in still waters and rivers, and fruit such as elderberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants and pieces of banana.
