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.

Since my pond is new, I decided to add some FHM spawning habitat. I got the idea from an old publication from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension called "Baitfish for Fun and Profit in Maine". Our house is being built, so I took some scrap untreated 2x6 and 2x8, laid them out on the patio, laid a piece of plastic string (poly electric fence) over the top and stapled it in place. I put 5 of them in the pond in 4-14" of water with a wooden stake on each end to keep them in place. I suspect they may mimic a lily pad (which I thankfully do not have). I may go down there with a battery operated grinder and wire wheel and rough up the underside so the eggs adhere better.

I haven't seen this particular publication referenced on here before but it has some useful information that is worth sharing. It has chapters on GSH, FHM, white sucker, long nose sucker and rainbow smelt cultivation. Although I have found that links on here often don't work well, here is the web address to where I found it:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/230047592.pdf

My pond water is still settling out and is therefore more turbid than it will eventually be. Although I have read that FHM are tolerant of turbidity, mine seem particularly attracted to the in flowing water. I suppose it's also possible that I'm seeing more of them there because it's clearer there. I suspect that although they are tolerant of the turbid water, they still probably prefer clearer water.

Besides the runoff from the natural drainage, I discovered a few small springs that were bubbling up. The photo doesn't give perspective unfortunately, but they are about the size of a baseball. Should I try to cap these with compacted clay so they don't become the source of a leak? At full pool, they will be about 6-8' under water. If so, any advice on how to do so? It seems that springs can be a blessing or a curse, and I'm a rookie so I'm not sure how to decide between the two.



Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way. This is such a great forum with such a wealth of knowledge.

This is just a guess, but if you see 'bubbling,' it may not be a spring; it may just be some air pockets being compressed as the weight of the water squeezes down onto the pond basin, thus causing a slow release of the air or gases.

If you can get a few wood pallets sunk, that will also help with fathead spawning, and it won't be visable from the surface (not that your current floating wood looks bad).