romitch47, welcome to the PondBoss forum. Your new pond sounds potentially wonderful.

Initially, when we bought the property 17 years ago, our 1/4 acre pond seemed to only have largemouth bass LMB, yellow perch YP, and 2 triploid grass carp TGC in it. Previous owner claimed there were several other species, but a couple years of closely observing and fishing the pond led me to believe the listed 3 species were all that we had.

Following ewest's and other forum wise men's suggestions, I stocked 24 adult bluegill BG early in the 20 teens. There are gobs of BG now, and green sunfish GSF. Existing LMB were not able to limit BG recruitment.

My thoughts, and I am absolutely no fish expert, are that the 30 adult bluegills and pumpkinseed could very easily fill the pond with recruits by this time next summer. At that time it might be appropriate to stock the bass. My young of year LMB are about 1 1/4" long right now, and not much of a threat to small sunfish.

Warm water fish grow somewhat slowly in our cool water pond. With some scorching hot days with air temps in the upper 90s, our pond water at 3' down has only made it to 74 degrees. Cool irrigation water is flowing in 24/7.

Do you have an inkling what the temperature profile of your pond water may be? I realize you have no history of years' worth of data.

Last edited by 4CornersPuddle; 07/16/26 04:22 PM. Reason: addition of text