This spring I would buy some pellet fed perch (40-100) from your neighbor Laggis Fish Farm. He has very good stock of domesticated perch that eat pellets. Perch will grow well on pellets that are fed to the trout. He can also advise about trout.
The 100 WE in 0.6 ac pond is probably too many. A neighbor of mine did that despite my advice and most of his WE never grew bigger than 10"-12". He thought he could keep them fed by seining minnows - didn't work. Your regularly adding 50 gal (400lbs) of fatheads may help with top end growth of WE. YP will also eat lots of FHM if they are not eating pellets. I estimate that each adult perch will eat about 1 lb of minnows per yr (250-325). It will take a whole lot of YOY perch & FHM to feed 100 WE. However, If you over stocked WE to produce heavy predation pressure that can result in big perch and are happy with 12" WE for eating then this could work well. Time will tell the rest of the story. Keep us posted on your results.
There is another pond owner near me that stocked 120 WE in a one acre with YP back in 2001. Plenty of forage minnows and shiners were available. After about 9 yrs the largest WE are around 19"-20" and relatively few perch are in the pond with still lots of minnow/shiner forage. Perch that are in the pond are mostly large. In this situation IMO there are too many WE and there is not enough larger sized forage fish for the WE to grow well above the 20" size if large WE are one of the goals. This same 'type of' problem can occur in LMB ponds. Bass won't grow larger than a certain size due to not enough adequate sized forage present. However I think this situation can be viewed as very good. A 19-20" is a very good size for cleaning-eating and YP are not overabundant and large sized. The predominance of medium sized WE are effectively cropping small common YP (2"-5") and effectively reducing their numbers.
As for trout, in your area of MI and if pond does not receive well or spring water do not expect trout to live past June. Depths of 20 ft and cool temps have nothing to do with maintaining trout in July-Aug in SW MI. It is loss of DO below the thermocline that will kill the trout in most all ponds. CJ is right, and I assume you already know this, if one wants the full benefit of trout in regular ponds in our region, the trout should be stocked as 1 lb+ fish in fall, fed pellets and harvest most fish before early to mid June.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 02/09/11 05:23 PM.
