Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Grass Carp and AquaMax MVP?!?!

Is this weird? The last week when I feed the BG and Catfish the two grass carp I stocked last spring are up eating pellets and are now highly visible. They are not skinny they are big fat healthy look looking fish, I would say now 3-4.5lb size. Last spring they were 10”

We are having a record rain fall this year and the grass around the pond has been plentiful as well.

Yep, they are pellet hogs.

Mine are also pellet hogs.
They are 3 years old now. I think they have an initial growth spurt, then slow down.
My pond has never had much vegetation, so it's really the only thing for them to eat. Occasionally I'll see FA floating, but I've never seen them eat it.
I have considered removing them since they dont really do any work, but I paid $15 each!
I might take one out and put it in the neighbors pond.
The trick is to catch one. The CC, LMB and BG are much more aggressive so they usually take the bait first.
Hell, the LMB try to eat bobber floats and my thermometer!

It took 4 yrs for my pond to get any vegetation going. And now my APW is doing good but now I have had some Southern Niad/Bushy Pond Weed show up. Seems to be pretty invasive from what I see and so I will be stocking some grass carp next spring. Not sure how many I want to stock because I would like to keep my APW and from what I can find out the bushy pond weed and the apw are preferred food for the grass carp. I did not really want the carp but I don't think I will have much choice now other than how many to add and when to add them.

TGW1...we stocked 4-6 grass carp per surface acre and i still have some issues with too much bushy pondweed. I have a nice growth of American pondweed which they seem to mostly leave alone.

This particular pond is small....1.6 acres....so it is easy to do a follow-up dose of diquat with a little cutrine plus mixed in and hit the bushy pondweed with a sprayer from a jon boat. I have a 4 foot sprayer wand that i can stick down into the b pondweed as i troll along about 5-10 feet from the shoreline. It works well if you keep up on it every couple of weeks.

I stocked 10 GC into that pond 2 years ago and they have grown but still need some assistance to keep the coontail and bushy pondweed under control it seems. BM61.

When not getting adequate weed control by GC, it is a good idea to pay attention to how many of the stocked GC actually survived predation by large bass. Smaller GC are narrow bodied and easily eaten by 18"+ LMB.