when should I and how many for my 1/5-1/4 acre pond? Lots of different adult sunfish stocked this year. New Pond.

Have you decided what species you want? I think I remember you talking about LMB before. However, with a small pond you might want the option of controlling predator numbers the HSB would give you.

Your mixed Lepomis forage base will likely produce less forage than a BG-based population would (at least in the short term); I think that would affect stocking numbers slightly.

didn't know if hsb would do good in a small pond but love the idea. What are some advantages or disadvantages either way. How many hsb would you stock? Does it take more bass or HSB to controll population? Thanks for the info guys!!! Oh, And should I wait a year before I do it and let the sunfish go for a while?

Advantages:

-Complete control over your predator numbers; no worries about stunted LMB.
-Probably a much better chance of pellet feeding by predators. This would let you stock the HSB sooner than LMB (have to wait for forage base to develop with them). If the numbers of small Lepomis gets too high, cut the amount fed to the HSB and they should eat more sunfish. If the sunfish numbers need raised, feed more to the HSB (or remove some).
-Smaller predator mouth size wrt body size; when restocking with adult predators in pond, smaller stockers can be safely added with HSB than with LMB.
-Genrerally accepted to fight better than LMB; probably less likely to become hook shy.

Disadvantages:

-Need to restock more HSB as needed for replacements.
-More susceptible to fatality after being caught in hot months. You can work with this by not fishing when it's so hot, accepting the losses (and eating them), or going into advanced fish rescusitation methods ala george's pure oxygen revival.

LMB are supposed to make better sunfish predators than HSB. Meadowlark and george are perhaps the two TX PMs with the most HSB experience; I suggest you review their posts on this species. I think you will find good stocking numbers suggested there.

I have found it absolutely impossible to control LMB numbers in a 1/4 acre pond. I've tried it twice and consider them an environmental disaster. I would go with whatever numbers HSB experts recommend.

Why do they get out of controll on a 1/4 acre? Do they do better in a bigger pond or smaller?

As a general rule small ponds change/react faster than large ones but they are easier to correct.That goes for the fish balance in them as well. A big pond reacts slower but is much harder to turn around. Like small boats vs big ships.

so far it sounds like letting lmb overpopulate is a pretty easy hands off method for big bluegill. Is there any downside if you don't care much about lmb? would that plan hurt how many sunfish my small pond could produce for eating? how many lmb would I start with?

My experience: 1/4 acre pond with BG, FHM, CC and LMB. The bass spawned and, over time, pretty well decimated all of the forage and then starved out and died off. I wound up with big CC and monster BG that were totally feed dependent. It took about 5 years of mistakes like that to be a champeen, hook shy, BG raiser. Of course, drought finally got them.

I would love to have a pond with large BG, but I have reservations about stocking for LMB overpopulation. It seems like in a pond full of small hungry bass you would catch many more bass than BG.

I was wondering about that yankee. Maybe I can think on it for a while. I just stocked them in so nothing needs to be controlled yet. I never knew hsb died after being caught. what to do what to do.....

Keith, I've not noticed as to whether you have, or plan to have aeration?
IMO that will have a lot to do about carrying capacity and types of fish to stock.

Not at this time and feeding will be infrequent. I've fertilized and had a bloom but dont notice and FA floating around any more or growing from the bank. Should I fertilize again? so it's basicly fertilized but not fed or aerated. I think all my gams got eaten because of lack of FA and other cover. The only cover is floded grass on the sides.