Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain recommendations for northern YP/SMB/BT pond

Feeding pellet trained perch high protein pellets will create a dream fishery for you. With the correct predatory pressure and population management you should easily catch one nice sized jumbo perch every 1-3 minutes. When you are catching mostly YP less than 8" long, the pond does not have enough predators eating the 3"-5" YP or you are not manually adequately thinning out enough of the small YP 2"-5" long. A correct number of predators will do this removal of small perch for you. Catching a jumbo perch every 20 minutes means the pond has too many predators eating too many of the young perch.

The forage base is finally getting started. I added 20 pounds of FHM today and have 20 dozen papershell crayfish coming next week. My source for eastern silvery minnows can’t get them until December, so I’ll order extra with the assumption that the YP and SMB that are going in this Fall will get many of them.

For now, it has several thousand tadpoles of variety species of toads and frogs, but predominantly green frogs. They look a lot like a bullfrog but don’t get as big. I’ve considered stocking bullfrog tadpoles, but I think I’ll hold off for now.

There are several species of plants coming in, all of which showed up naturally. One of my next projects will be identifying them.

I’m enjoying the journey.