If your impression of the making of carp bait is simply chucking a bit of this and a bit of that into a bowl and mixing it together you are absolutely right! But if you really want baits that will be so irresistible that you just know the fish will feed on it in advance of making baits it takes some know-how. But this article is about making easy boilies and ground baits and luckily I have selected a range of bait ingredients that are totally suitable for making a range of baits that you can trust completely in the winter.

With all these ingredients you can make your own unique ground baits, method mixes, stick mixes, spod mixes, boilies, pellets, pastes and bait wraps etc.

Where might you begin making any of these? Well I recommend taking a really good look at fish senses first and not recipes or ingredients! We will be exploiting these senses and their especial sensitivities to certain substances in our carefully chosen ingredients, additives liquids etc because this is surely among the most reliable ways to induce a really strongly enthusiastic feeding response. I wrote an entire ebook on this very subject along with flavours and feeding triggers and other successful substances because it is so very powerful to be able to exploit fish senses by leveraging bait substances in well-known and new ways!

Big carp baits are even better in cold water if they really have improved water-solubility qualities because this really allows your bait to reach the fish via the water (i.e. in solution) to maximise bait effects on carp senses. Solubility also really helps baits get digested better and more often than not the ingredients or bait additives that are most soluble are usually very easily digested and this is no coincidence! Some of these much more easily digested and soluble additives and ingredients simple familiar product such as molasses meal, malt extract powder, Vanilla extract powder, Belachan powder, honey, Marmite, and Feedstim XP powder.

Incidentally a very good addition to your ground baits and boilie mixes are CC Moore hemp pellets and CSL pellets and provide all kinds of soluble nutrition such as amino acids and oils etc. Simply add them to your liquids, let them go soft and break down before and mix them thoroughly before adding dry powder ingredients to make paste etc. In testing I made a very successful winter and spring baits that included 2 hour break-down CC Moore Amino 365 pellets alongside their Cantax Red and Milkimin pellets in the swim.

Another very simple solution for a beginner just starting out learning about bait-making is to try using a very well proven nutritionally-stimulating and easily-digested open-textured bulk binder powder or meal that is ideal for both boilies and ground baits in cold water conditions! This method will obviously be very successful in warmer conditions too!

To make superb homemade boiled baits you could simply start-off using readymade ground baits and use binding liquids such as liquid eggs or include whole egg powder. For really instant and reliable beginner cold-water ground baits and boilies you might choose to use a generous volume of liquids in your ground baits and boilies to really boost dissolved bait impacts on fish senses.

Special products ideal for this multiple job of making ground baits and boilies etc include the CC Moore Meggablends in including the Sweet and the Red versions. The Meggablend Red is a potent combination of egg foods, crushed seeds, biscuit meals, Carophyll Red, oils, sugars and more. These are very instant and highly popular nutritional bulk ingredients with attraction and binding properties ideal for ground baits and for boilie-making.

There are many binders each having certain benefits and effects and special advantages for various uses and applications and it is advisable to look for the most reliable and new ones that are mostly little used - to get the edge!

Bread crumbs are one of the most used cheap ingredients and although many carp anglers are snobbish about using bread remember it is made from yeast and flour and both semolina (durum wheat) and yeast powders and extracts have enormous success and are used in very many readymade carp baits. Just breadcrumbs and liquid yeast makes an excellent cheap ground bait and bread and Marmite paste has caught me carp since the day I started although today there are many additves I would also add for even more potent instant impacts.

Tiger nut flour is a really outstanding bulk ingredient for ground baits and making boilies etc. With its oils and creamy highly attractive aroma and taste is an excellent carp bait ingredient for making homemade and readymade boilies - but why not use it in making ground baits?

Vanilla Extract meal is a very attractive highly digestible ingredient that could be used to make up to half of your ground bait or boilie mix.

Wheatgerm is an essential part of winter ground bait design. It significantly improves your bait performance. It boosts carp bait digestion and you will notice it in premium cold water koi feeds for instance. Try about 300 grams per kilogram to carry the liquid attraction of your bait through all the water layers to get an edge. Combined with things like rolled oats, flaked maize, and crushed hemp this really does a great job and you will notice the difference!

Two other bulk ingredients that are also very effective in winter are the milk powder Vitamealo and molasses meal. Both these are highly water-soluble and really help performance of baits by leaching out in solution, further opening up the bait so its attraction really pulls the fish in excited to feed on your hook baits!

If you simply base your ground baits or boilies on Meggablend, bread crumbs, Vanilla Extract meal, wheat germ and tiger nut flour you will have a very reliable bait, but ideally we want to hedge our bets and press those carp senses buttons in a variety of ways. (For much more valuable information see my homemade bait-making readymade bait secrets of success website Baitbigfish right now!)

By Tim Richardson.

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