Good morning all.
One good thing about Texas drought and hot summers is two years ago I finally got my Father's permission to clean out a couple of small ponds that have not been maintained since they were built in the 50's.

My first was a small pond 65 yards x 90 yards at full level. Using a manually adjustable road blade on the back of a 125 horse John Deere tractor plus the front bucket and a small but not "mini" excavator and a trash pump I dug a sump at the deepest end and pumped the water out and began working the edges moving toward the center. Silted in is an understatement. I put the spoils on the back side of the dam to reinforce it.

I did not try to make the pond bigger, just clean it. Once it was cleaned out we eyeballed a taped up piece of PVC pipe, edge to edge at full line gave us a max depth of 14 feet. On the South bank using the blade I cut a three foot wide shelf for every two foot of depth for spawning beds and layered fine crushed limestone on top of them. We had some Live Oak trees come over in a storm and I cut the trunks off right below the first branch and topped the branches. I drug those to the middle of the pond and packed them as tight as they would allow. I used old hay straw and layered strips of hay 5 to 6 inches thick by 6 foot wide and 50 feet long over the natural runoff inlet. I ran chicken wire over that and used rebar 2 foot long with washers welded to the top to hold it all down.

Good thing I did because three months later we got a big storm that dropped 9 inches of rain in two days and it completely filled the pond. This was two years ago. I have been intermittently checking on the pond and a couple weeks ago I noticed lots of little bugs plus little tufts of Chara (unfortunately) starting to grow on the shelves I had cut into the South side. Yesterday I dropped three thousand fat head minnows in it to start growing and get naturalized to the pond. I am planning on going to one of the other ponds we have and with a fine dipnet try to get some PK Shrimp to put in there. My current plan is to let this pond sit for probably around another 14 months or so, then add red eared sunfish. There are no ponds upstream from this one and the neighbors are too poor to spend money on fertilizer or weed spray so chemical contamination is not a worry.

My Father was ecstatic with the work and thought I put into this project and he is excited about a sunfish only pond. (He LOVES to eat sunfish.) How do yall think I am doing so far and what do you think of my plan? Am I missing a step anywhere? Do you think I should add another forage supply for my future sunfish? I "think" I have the bases covered but any and all opinions, questions are greatly appreciated.