Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking What forage for existing pond

I have a 3 acre pond with lmb and bg in it. I think it is bass heavy with most bass being around 8-12 inches and a few in the 5 pound range. I just recently go into trying to manage the pond after getting tired of catching small bass all the time. I want to really get the weight up on these bass and hopefully create some trophies. BTW this pond is in Va. Anyways i'm thinking of starting a fertilizing program in the spring and I want to know how I can build a forage base other than the bg I already have and what forage to use. I have looked into FHM and GSH, but from reading posts on here it sounds hard to get a good base with lmb already in the pond. It is anywhere from 8in to 5 ft deep, clear water, and it gets a lot of grass in it during the summer. any help would be great like I said I am new to this. thanks

Welcome to the forum!

Wow, 3 acres and only 5 feet deep? Any way to drain, deepen and renovate?

I'm not the most knowledgable here on balance correction, but I am sure you will need to remove a bunch of LMB. Since the pond is mature, I doubt adding more fish will help as it is bound to be at it's capacity already. Fertilizing in the spring may help reduse the grass in depths of 3 feet or more, but it sounds like that may not be a very large area. Others will be along to ask specific questions and offer much more direct help.

Like Rainman said, Welcome to Pond Boss.

His comments sound right on to me. The first step would be removing a lot of LMB. Many times this is done with a slot limit for culling. You might want to consider removing any LMB that is 11" or shorter, or something like that.

Sometimes a good starting point is to remove 50 lbs. of LMB per acre. You could start w/ trying to cull 150 lmb or 50 lmb/acre and see where that gets you.

Bluegill are the backbone of the LMB foodchain, so you might not want to remove any of them for now.

Having a lot of weeds facilitates two things among others:

1) Allows more YOY fish to survive which helps overpopulating and undernourishment of predator fish.

2) Makes it harder for the predators (LMB in this case) to easily find their food.

Once you get the LMB overpopulation under control, Yellow Perch might be a possible self-sustainable addition to help boost forage.

Grass carp might be a consideration to help control the weeds. Many experts say you only want 20-30% weed growth.

If you can get adult golden shiners in right before they start spawning, with all the grass some fry would probably survive.

When was the last time the pond was stocked? To raise big bass you need to make sure you don't have hybrid bluegill.

Im in SWVA by the way and would be happy to remove some bass

I second (3rd?) the comments about removing LMB. Unless you have unlimited pockets there is no way that you could put enough forage in the pond to get the LMB up to weight. Another thing, once the fish are stunted, they will NEVER get as big as they would have if not stunted.

FWIW, it takes 10# of forage to put 1# on ONE LMB.

Welcome to Pond Boss from a fellow Virginian...

Just a question, whats wrong with hybrid bluegill?

HBG do not produce good amounts of offspring for forage. Their offspring are a high % male ( 65 - 99 %). They have an application for ponds but not as forage production.

How much is a lot of grass? What kind of vegetation is it?