Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Building a dam DavidV's Pond Project; Guy with a Water Bottle

George, it's a pretty standard practice in pond management. The one significant reason for not doing it is if one lives far enough north that a pond ices over; most pondmeisters and biologists on here advise against fertilizing in such circumstances due to the increased risk of winter kill, though as I have noted in past posts, there are numerous state agencies and one regional wildlife agency in northern climes that definitely have ice-over every winter, that still recommend the practice for pond owners. I think you've confused the caution exercised by northern pond managers fearing winter kill, with a general caution against fertility. Plankton is the foundation of the food chain in any pond, northern or southern, eastern or western; less plankton equals less food for the fish, from the bottom of the food chain to the top, and less food equals less growth. As noted above, it makes sense to thoroughly evaluate one's BOW and proceed cautiously when contemplating fertilization in a northern pond, but there's no reason not to fertilize a southern pond unless the pond maintains a great plankton bloom year-round without help, which very few ponds do (many ponds experience brief, unsustained blooms at sporadic intervals, but in my experience I can't ever remember seeing one that maintained an ideal bloom from spring through fall such as one would typically get in a pond that's regularly fertilized, without fertilization).

If by "disaster" you mean three to ten times the carrying capacity of what the pond had prior to fertilization, along with fish growth that's exponentially faster than before fertilization, I think most pond owners would welcome that sort of disaster. I've worked with over twenty different ponds and small lakes that were former phosphate pits, which means they're about as naturally fertile as a body of water can possibly be; many of these bodies of water did at times have good plankton blooms prior to fertilization, but the blooms were sporadic; when I began managing the ponds the blooms no longer were sporadic because I fertilized them. And I had no disasters. But the fish did begin growing drastically faster than they had before fertilization.