Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Fertilization New to all this...Tell me what I am missing

Thanks again for all the great input. I want to summarize the advice and approach as a result of the discussion.

Note- current visibility is the pond per secchi disk is 30-36 inches. Water temp is 70 degrees at the surface.

1) Use tilapia for algae control. Suggested stocking rates varied; however, I would like to get fish delivered, so that puts the number somewhere around 40-50 pounds per acre. Most seem to have a minimum order of $1000. I have spoken with Pond King and Overton's. Pond King expects to receive their fish around mid April; others said early May.

2) Consider grass carp for pond weed. Found out that I need a permit for carp. Haven't looked into it yet. I don't have a problem with the amount of pondweed now, but perhaps fertilization would result in a problem, which brings me to:

3) Fertilization- I think what I heard was "do not fertilize". (Or maybe it was do not fertilize yet, or this year.) Seems I cannot/should not fertilize until tilapia and carp are in place. Given the timing of tilapia availability, it seems no one can fertilize until about early May. But water temps would say do it now. I'm a little confused here. Seems for plankton to help the chain it needs to be going when fry are hatched.

If you use Cutrine Plus to knock back any FA, that will free up more nutrients for phytoplankton and for the Pondweed. It'll be a race to see who gets it (the nutrients) first.

My pond can go from 24" to 60+" of visibility depending on the amount of plants/FA in the pond utilizing the nutrients.

Minimum order of $1,000? WOW! That must be new.

Fertilizing if I remember right can actually fertilize your problems if you don't have them under control first.. IMHO just mine if your fry have habitat they will survive and fertilizing is not necessary or essential just an opinion for my area anyway..

Dave- the minimums as I recall were for delivery orders. Overton's was a dollar amount as I recall. Others had a poundage minimum plus delivery fee which put it between $1000-$1110 for 100 pounds.

I ended up connecting with Bob Lusk on this topic, which proved invaluable.

We did fertilize last Tuesday and it appears we have a decent bloom started.

We have some tilapia that should be showing up soon. This is not from Bob but another biologist who does a good amount of work in this area. We are following his suggestion of 40 pounds. I have treated the FA with Cutrine Plus to the point that the surface FA has mostly disappeared.

I have not pursued grass carp as it did not surface in my discussions with Lusk; however, I have heard recommendations for adding up to 20 (max allowed by TPWD for a 2 acre pond). I just cannot recall a good lake with grass carp, though I've personally seen more than one ruined. I am biased by a small sample size but I just don't see us doing this unless things get way out of hand - no reason to believe that will happen.

We ordered a feeder that showed up today. Will be feeding Aquamax 500 2x per day. The bluegill are plentiful and healthy already. Will be interesting to see what happens.

I have stopped bass fishing the pond. I saw some decent bass on beds (3-4# range), but I did not see as many or the size of big fish I expected. Next spring we will probably shock the lake.

My fishing is focused on removing catfish. So far I've taken out two CC that look like clones. The one I weighed went 9.8. I hope there are not 100s of them as I really don't have a way to dispose of them. The only way to make this fun would be bowfishing, but I suspect they would wise up to that game quickly.

We don't have a strategy yet for removing crappie. I saw a thread here about fyke nets which was fascinating. I've caught very few crappie so far on a jig. A project for another day.

I would skip the GC for now and see how the tilapia work. Nice report and keep us posted ! You can remove , selectively, a lot of fish by electroshocking. Just an idea.