I haven't done a very good job of keeping this updated but I'll try a bit here..
This summer has kicked my butt.. Too many things all at one time-I bit off too much...:-))
Building is about done but the overhead doors are on back-order. Was told yesterday mid november which creates a problem I have NO CONTROL over.. Going to be hard to move Tilapia inside and save them with 2 big missing doors.
Need to figure out how to heat incoming well water a bit and various other items that I'm running out of time on...
Red shiners and Bluntnose has exploded beyond anything I could have imagined, my 18 SMB cost me about 800$ to get my hands on the purest strain of Tennessee SMB I could find after some DNA work but it'll pay off in the long-haul. All of my females are 16-18" Dale Hollow smallies and I'm hand feeding 2-3" BG to those, mixed with 25-30 good sized craws a week and (interestingly) they love BF tadpoles.
Rusty, circulation is provided by a parallel garden hose shooting volume and pressure spray. Nedoc sent me some video of how his SMB were reacting and it flat out works to bring smallies in to hit anything that hits the water including Optimal bass pellets. The smb breeder pond is the only one I'm doing that with right now but I think I'll be setting up the smallie growout pond to do the same. I thought I might have to do this to get reds to spawn properly but they do just fine on gravel, rock, weeds, wild millet-doesn't seem to matter.