3.5 acres is big enough to have a nice bass lake; you could grow three or four real trophies, and good numbers of three- to six-pound fish, based on where you live and stocking mostly F-1s or Floridas or a mixture of the two. I would load up the new pond now with forage including GSH, TS, FHM, and tilapia, and crayfish if you can get them. Zetts hatchery in WV sells crayfish and they ship all over the U.S.:
http://zettsfishhatchery.com/id53.htmlI've never bought crayfish from them, but I have gotten fish from them a few different times and had great luck with them, never had so much as a single dead fish though they shipped them to TN.
It looks like you already have some decent-sized bluegill in the existing pond, so it wouldn't be too difficult to make it into a first-rate trophy bluegill pond. I would start by not keeping or allowing anyone to keep any bass so that they overpopulate; an overcrowded bass population keeps the bluegill well-thinned such that the ones that survive the bass gauntlet grow several times faster and larger than in a pond in which the bluegill were more crowded. If you don't have a lot of bass in the pond currently, it wouldn't be a bad idea to stock a few or several in the 8-10" size. Install one or two automatic feeders and begin feeding twice a day, or three times if they eat the food really well; you'll probably have to cut back to once a day during the winter, but you should be able to feed all through the winter unless you're at a high elevation and get harsh winters. Start a monthly regimen of fertilization beginning next March (you'll probably have to apply twice in March to get a bloom, but after that once a month should do it) and fertilize March through October every year. I would recommend stocking some CNBG just because they grow faster and larger than common northern-strain bluegill, especially at southern latitudes like you are; Overton has some beautiful CNBG that get really big. But you would need to stock the largest ones they can get you, as fingerlings would get munched by the bass and bluegill already in the pond. Lastly, a few of us on here have stocked grass shrimp as an additional forage for bluegill, and especially if you have some weedgrowth or even just decent cover of any type in the pond, stocking them could make a difference, especially if they successfully establish. More than one pondmeister on here has had them establish in his pond this year.
