Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Raising Forage and Bait raising fhm in a 50gal barrel

has anyone ever tried raising fhm in a barrel? i have access to food grade barrels and id like to try and raise my own fhm. mostly just for fun but id like to throw some in my new pond from time to time. anyone got an opinion on this. i do have a small areator that i could put in it as well.

You can do that and it works well. The thing you need to be concerned with the cannibalism. They will eat their young. Let the water stand a couple of days before stock to get some mosquito larva started so they have something immediate to eat. The larva will only last about two days.

Put some weeds in it so they have something to lay their eggs on. What are you going to use as feed. They do well on fish food and fish food flakes.

I have kept them in buckets for long periods of time and put them in livestock troughs to control mosquitoes. Tough fish.

Water quality issues will be your biggest challenge... You will need some sort of filtration system to keep it at a suitable level, even for FHM. As has been stated, they will eat their own fry. FHM are not picky about what they eat and can be fed ground up fish pellets, goldfish flake food or just about any other fish food out there. They spawn on the underside of flat items, so providing these in your container would encourage their spawning. Producing large numbers of them is not going to happen in a 50 gallon barrel. You may be able to keep 30 adult fish under good filtration and transfer their young regularly to another location for grow out of fodder...

River rat, the easiest way for you might be to just pump water from your new pond into the barrels for a form of flow-through system.

hey im back. been out of town for a while. thanks for that advice guys. im glad it wasnt a crazy idea. i come up with some duzies some times. i probably am stuck with feeding them flake food. i have a filter/areator system that is pretty small so it should work. im not looking to stock a pond but i would like to throw a few out from year to year just to say i did it. my kids are nuts about growing stuff so its more of a kid project. thanks again for the encouragement.

Want to have some fun? Get a barrel full of them and then toss a couple of baby LMB in. They disappear in an amazingly short time.

Thanks to Big AL(AHVATSA) for this one.

river rat, some of the benefits of pumping water from your pond through the barrels is that you would probably not need to feed the fish as they will eat the food from the pond water, also you will not need filtration or need to worry about water quality issues.

The downside with however you hold the fish will be cold weather. If the barrel water drops much below 37* the fish will likely die. A flow through will help keep the water temps higher. Pump water from a couple feet deep in warm months and from the bottom in winter months.

hey rainman i did throw 5lbs of fhm in my new pond. id say i lost about 20 or so. i think a few of them died in the past couple of days. im assuming thats normal. looks kinda hard for them all to live. do you think there is enough forage in my new pond or would you recomend feeding the fhm? i got about 4ft in it. i could use another huricane but im sure i wont make any friends in fl or al by saying that.

I agree with Rex in that the simplest way to go would be a flow through from the pond so that the pond would do your biofiltration for you. However you should still have some kind of mechanical filtration (clarifier), or your water will probably get filthy with suspended and sinking solids from feeding and possibly algae etc. from the pond even with fresh pond water coming in. Another barrel, small pump, u tube siphon (easily made from PVC), and deer fence netting would be all you would need to remove and trap particulates.

If you have the issue where I did an article an RAS you can build the clarifer just like the one in the article only you will be using a barrel for the fish and a barrel for the clarifier. Build it so overflow goes back to the pond and new water comes in from the pond. Both could be done via gravity with the pump that pulls the water up through the clarifer the engine that moves it all.

thanks cecil. im also wondering about frezzing in the winter. any experience with that?

No, but as far as flow through, it doesn't take much water movement to stop freezing especially in your local. It does present some problems though with the clarifier. If you could keep it in a shed out of the weather that would make difference. It's amazing what a differce keeping something out of the weather can make. Our ice shanties up here are really nothing more than a tarp and we can keep cozy warm in them especially with a gas lantern.

Feeding some pellets will never hurt, but adult Fatheads can live several weeks without food. 20 fish out of ~2500 is less than 1% mortality and not uncommon, just from the handling of the fish.

I won't speak for Cecil since you actually asked this of him, but if you recirculate pond water from near the botttom during the winter AND you have a reasonable flow of 1-2 GPM, the water in your barrels should not have an issue with freezing or temps too low for the fish to survive. Just be sure to draw water in warner months from higher in the pond (above the thermocline) to avoid pumping water with low dissolved oxygen levels.

You'll have fun raising the minnows and even if everything goes wrong, we're only talking about maybe $10-$20 worth of fish. You are not a Pond Meister till you kill at least a million fish, so you have a lot to do to get there.