[/quote]I would not add grass carp until you see a need. Some submerged weeds are beneficial for several reasons and their growth always competes with algae for available nutrients. Competition is how nature works. No pond weeds? Then algae is the only plant present that will grow fast to consume the always available dissolved nutrients. Jones FH loves naive new pond owners because they can sell them all sorts of money making items - products.
[quote] As much as love SMB, I do like you're suggestion of WE-HSB-YP-RES. Do you think something like 6 WE, 2 HSB, 2 SMB would be a good start, or would you recommend just trying to stick with 6 WE and 4 HSB for now?
The WE-HSB-YP-RES combo is very good for numerous reasons best one is if you don't like what it produces,, you can always later add BG-HBG-LMB and they will soon dominate the fishery. Can't do the opposite of producing WE-HSB-YP-RES with established BG-LMB.
You can initially use SMB but remember they WILL reproduce but not always in abundance. You can't stop it without a concerted effort of stocking one sex SMB. So with SMB you will have to manage for population control due to their ability to almost always over eat the food source. Dr Willis our fish guru from SDSU had numerous instances of SMB overpopulating producing too many small SMBass in his northern research ponds. Limited natural foods can be minimized by feeding high quality fish pellets. I have found that many of the recruitment SMB in ponds will learn to eat fish pellets. Feeding pellets almost always produces more fish biomass that if not harvested appropriately becomes a bigger and bigger pellet consuming "machine" to cause reduced water quality from eventual over fertilization. Feeding pellets feeds eutrophication (enhanced nutrient enrichment and plant growth). SMB will do very well in a small Ohio pond. I have grown them to 21" and 5 lbs in a 1/3 ac mud bottom pond. They can even thrive as the only fish in a small pond however as lone fish specie growth will usually be small in the 8"-10" range. I often use SMB as a "tool" to assist in specially management of various pond organisms.
