Preparing Wheat for Carp Fishing

Once upon a time I used to fish the Burton Mere syndicate in South Wirral, I fished those lakes from 1989 to 1993 and the place was a big part of my carp fishing apprenticeship, you might say I ‘cut my teeth’ on those lakes. During my time on there the owner built some stock ponds and one day I noticed him walking round with a bucket and scoop, he was lashing feed into the lakes and at the time I was hungry for info so I asked him what the feed was?. ‘Wheat’ came the reply, he was feeding his fish wheat and as it turns out wheat was a very good carp bait too. I had to try some and what I found was indeed a very good and very cheap bait for carp fishing so let’s take a look at preparing wheat for carp fishing.

Wheat for fishing, you won't find a cheaper carp bait

Like all particles for carp fishing, wheat has to be soaked and boiled so I generally fill my bucket with an inch or two of dried wheat. On top of the dried wheat I pour around 4 times as much water as there is wheat because it’s going to expand as it soaks and it will expand even further once it’s cooked. With the water added I give it 24hrs to soak then I boil it for no more than 10 minutes, wheat is reasonably soft compared to some seeds so it doesn’t need to be boiled quite as hard as seeds like hemp and pigeon conditioner. With the wheat boiled it’s just a case of tipping the wheat back into the bucket and leaving it to cool down then it’s ready to go fishing with.

Preparing Wheat for Carp Fishing, click below to watch

Like all particles you can use wheat as a background feed as part of a spod mix, you can fish other particles or boilies over the top or you can fish with wheat itself. In recent years fishing for carp with wheat and any other particle for that matter, has been made easy by Fox Arma Mesh. Arma mesh works the same way as a pva mesh system accept the mesh doesn’t dissolve, it retains the seeds and protects them from nuisance fish. The ability to use hair rigged particles for carp fishing is a real string to the carp angler’s bow, especially on heavily pressured carp waters where the fish will turn away from boilies when the angling pressure bites. Small packets of seeds have been a big fishing edge of mine for quite a while now, in fact the fox arma mesh is now a standard part of my fishing kit and I don’t go fishing without it

A small package of wheat made with Fox Arma Mesh fooled this common carp

My articles for this blog usually come with a corresponding video which is published to my youtube channel. The video is embedded into this article so please click on it to watch how I prepare wheat for carp fishing. My youtube channel is worth subscribing to as well and you can do that on youtube or by clicking one of the subscribe buttons on this page, don’t forget to click on the bell icon to make sure you get notifications of when my videos are published, that way you won’t miss out. My video on preparing wheat for carp fishing has lots of information in it along with the captures I made using wheat as a hookbait during filming. You can see first hand that wheat is a very good bait for catching carp. It’s not just for carp though, wheat is a very good bait for roach, tench and bream too so this article is useful for other specimen anglers and not just carpers.

A nice common caught on a wheat hookbait made with fox arma mesh

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at wheat, I’ll finish with a very useful point about wheat as a carp bait, it’s cheap, very cheap!, 20k of hemp costs £40-£45 at the time of writing and the sack of re-cleaned wheat I used in the video cost just £7.50 so using wheat for carp fishing gives exceptional value for money.
Until next time, tight lines.
Mark.