Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - How to re-establish grass in a clear pond

Hey folks! Good Day!! I have a 7 acre pond with this History... It was overpopulated with LMB. Fished hard and got it under control about 10 years ago. Began fertilizing to cloudy the water to help retard some of the Nyad grass. Fishing was really good. Had lots of Nyad growing and becoming a problem. Folks started complaining about the grass so I Had a professional come and poison and added grass carp. Fast forward to current, we noticed for the past 2 years, we have minimal baitfish and minnows being seen. The pond have several "flat" areas of 2ft and less of water with no grass trying to grow at all there. As clear as the water is,4-5ft visibility, it seems to me that grass should be growing. I have been cutting trash trees around the edge and dropping them into the water for cover. Fishing is down but I think it's obviously because of minimal grass, minimal cover for baitfish, so minimal fish. I'm thinking of trying to plant some type good grass cover that may also help with ducks??? Millet, or whatever you think would help. I think that grass and structure improvement makes more sense than just dumping lots of bait into the pond. Your thoughts are appreciated!!

Grass carp GC) are very likely eating all the "grass" that is trying to grow. Keep removing GC until the "grass" starts again growing. Planting more vegetation will likely just feed the GC. Reduce numbers of GC. What probably happened was chemically killing the vegetation and then one was too eager to add too many GC. Thus as the GC grew bigger too many of them overate (denuded) the vegetation. A common problem when stocking GC.

I think the LMB are again becoming too abundant and eating too much of the forage fishes. Too many hog bass consume too much food that is being produced by the pond. I would start using selective harvest of them until you began having more forage species. Adding habitat will help produce increased forages but if the productive LMB keep producing more new bass each year. You need to remove enough bass as the bass keep increasing their numbers to keep overeating the forage base no matter how much forage is produced or added. The bass numbers have to be balanced to the amount available of so they don't overeat the food being produced by the pond.

That would be nice. Even electroshocking isn't a sure thing. I shocked a customers pond 3x over a 6 year time frame and it wasn't until the last time that we shocked 2 TGC that the customer thought were dead. One was 50+#, the other was 39#. We had tried to establish underwater weeds for years with no success. This was a 4 acre, 12' deep pond. There might be more TGC in there as he doesn't remember how many were put in.

We had grass carp added over 20 years ago. For the last 10 years I have been trying to establish native vegetation to replace the alligator grass (the only thing nothing will eat). Just this year I'm finally seeing Illinois pond weed growing outside of cages. I think the damn grass carp may have finally died. I fed deer corn in my pond feeder this spring. I was told the grass carp would eat it, it would expand in their gut, and kill them. Maybe it worked? Our GC were over 4 feet long. Nothing but alligator weed grew outside of cages. 50 acre lake.