Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Feeding new pond feeding question?

i stocked my 1/2 acre pond about a month ago with 350 native bluegill 150 redears 50 channel cat and 7 pounds of flathead minnows.all of these fish are fingerlings.i have been feeding them a small amount of food daily and i have also tried in different areas. so far the only fish that i have seen eating the floating pellets have been the flathead minnows.is this normal or not?thanks for any help you can give me.i was thinking that i would see atleast some bluegill and cats feeding by about 3 weeks or so.

From my experience what you are seeing is sometimes fairly typical especially if the bgill were not trained to eat pellets prior to stocking. Don't ever expect to see the redears eat pellets. A new pond with newly stocked fish has lots of natural food for the fingerlings. As the natural food supplies dwindle the fish start looking around for other foods. The pellet eating fathead minnows will lead other fish to the food. Sometime the new fish are shy of humans. Be patient and diligent, but don't overfeed. Wasted food will help contribute to additional filamentous algae growth. You may not get active pellet feeding from the fingerlings until next spring.

thanks for the good advice.

I thought I would throw in my two cents, for the first time. I'm in North Florida, finished building a one acre pond July 1, filled it up (average depth 5 ft) mainly via a well, stocked it first week of October with 350 bluegill and 150 shellcracker, and installed a Kasco 1 h.p. aerating fountain 2nd week of October. The guy at the fish hatchery told me to throw in about a quart a day of floating food......he recommended the local FRM brand of floating catfish pellets; so I picked up the fish on a Friday and went down to the corner store the following morning to get a bag of FRM catfish pellets (which they stock next to the pig and poultry food, and opposite the bread rack (mostly white). So I deligently threw in a plastic drink cup full of the pellets in the morning and the evening (per instructions). I sat there on the dock and watched the floating pellets float away, without any apparent interest from any fish. So after a week or so, I decided that I was wasting my time and probably polluting the water. Then it occured to me that maybe I should make the food more palatable to those little 1" babies that I unceramoniously dumped into the pond. So I put a handfull of the FRM catfish food between two heavy duty shop towels and beat on it with a two pound hand held sledge hammer. So now, every morning, I beat up my fish food, go down to the dock, and throw it into a feeding ring (another tip from someone, made out of two 10' pcs of 1/2" electrical conduit). The bottom line to this saga, is that over the last month, I have never seen more than about 15-20 fish at any one time, and that's out of 500. They still ignore anything on the surface, and I can't verify what they do with whatever hits the bottom.

So that's my story, until tomorrow, when I'm sure there will be something else happening out there.

Excellent advice. I had all kinds of problems with algae when I first built my pond and fed the fish too much. Just throw in a hand full now and then when the water warms up next spring. It won't be long until the bluegill are following you around the pond waiting to be fed.