I have been reading this forum for years and finally have a pond to post about myself. We dug the pond in 2021 it will be 2.5 surface acres when at full pool and 20' deep in the main section of the pond. After digging we have waited for it to fill from rainfall. It took until last week when we got 6.5'' of rainfall in one night and it put 15'+ of water in in/ went from a 1/16 acre puddle 2-3' deep to 1.5 acres and 16' deep. Now that I have a significant amount of water in there it is time to start stocking. We have 36 acres of watershed that is all prairie grass or pasture ground for a few horses so no worries about fertilizer/pesticide runoff into the pond. We plan to not just fish it but it will also be our swimming hole.
I have worked with TJ at Hudland Management to developed a stocking strategy for a cool season fishery with YP and SMB with RES as my main forage base. I am lucky a friend has a private pond with a small ghost shrimp population and I have released 150-200 Ghost shrimp with half of them having some eggs present at release. I have released a bag of 1000ish scuds in the pond when it was only a puddle a while back. That seems like a drop in the bucket now. As far as forage fish Id like to find and release some red horse minnow or Bluntnose minnows. Since there is 2 almost 3 years of weeds and oats grass growth on the banks there is a lot of room for fish to hide and reproduce. I may wait until this fall to start putting in predatory fish or even next spring and give these forage species lots of time to reproduce. This should give the ghost shrimp plenty of time to establish some. I know I need more but sourcing and price is very inhibitory.
Any other advice would be much appreciated. Any dos and don'ts.
Excerpt from Robert Crais' "The Monkey's Raincoat:" "She took another microscopic bite of her sandwich, then pushed it away. Maybe she absorbed nutrients from her surroundings."
