Recycle Seafood By-products as Bait, Garden Fertilizer and More
While cleaning your fish and other seafood, remember that nearly every part of your catch can be useful. The belly sections of many fish can be brined, frozen and kept for fishing bait. In some cases, entire carcasses can be saved for crabbing or other baits. Shrimp heads, leftover bait, entrails and other parts all make excellent chum.
Discarded seafood parts can enrich your garden and provide much needed minerals to your soil. Shrimp, lobsters and crabs all have a hard shell that can be added to your compost pile or buried in the garden. Fish bones, scales, skins and carcasses are other excellent additions to your garden soil. Even seaweed, rinsed to remove the salt, makes a superb mulch or compost additive. These are all simple, environmentally friendly, natural ways to dispose of seafood discards while enriching your garden. The results can be amazing!
Other seafood by products may not be needed for compost but can be used or recycled in some way. Clam shells make great walkways, or other fill for other projects. Mussel and oyster and other shells can be crushed and made available to poultry or wildlife.
A little forethought and enginuity can go a long way towards saving money, helping the envirnoment and eliminating leftover fish and seafood.