Put in a new pond last year, a little over an acre over 20' at deep end 15' at shallow end. We added lots of good artificial structure in the deep end.
Pond is 3/4 full now, last fall I added ten or twenty pounds of fathead minnows.

Late this spring I added;

Another 20 pounds of fathead minnows
150 3" yellow perch
100 3" red eared sunfish
25 3" black crappie
25 6" walleye

I am feeding pellets at the pond a few times a week. The minnows have definitely spawned a couple times...lots of little fish fry around edges.

Plan is to add 50 4"-6" smallmouth this fall and 15 5" Hybrid striped bass next spring.


Is there any downside to adding ten or fifteen pounds of 2"-3" golden shiners now? Is there any chance of shiners causing any problems?

The fish our family are most interested in are the smallmouths and perch, but everything will be on the menu.

I'd add them, you will need vegetation in shallow water for them to spawn on. The Crappie will need the small fish to eat. If it was my pond, I'd yank all of the crappie out asap.

Got a question…. Is it just here that BCP don’t thrive well in ponds with predators or just up north. All the ponds around here struggle to keep any much less a lot of them. My 6 acre pond is pushing 10 years old and there are less and less BCP in it. Same thing in ponds close by. Very curious about what going on.

Note on the SMB... If you are wanting 8-12" fish to eat, ok.. If you are wanting to see really good growth and some 12-14" fish in 3 years, I'd back off 10-12 fish on the SMB stocking.
I'd also back off 10 or so on the WAE and save your money on stocking 20 lbs more of FHM. If you stocked 10-20lbs last fall, that void has been filled or is being filled right now. 20lbs is roughly 6000 minnows.. you've probably got 20,000-30,000 hatching every day right now.
Everything will be on the menu for SMB, WAE, YP, BCP and HSB too!
Yes.. add GSH.

Up here, if there is sufficient spawning habitat and no removal of BCP by angling, it all depends on the LMB population as to how the BCP fare. In ponds up here, it's rare to see a LMB bigger than 5#, maybe 6# in ponds that aren't actively managed.

As of right now we have no plans to add any LMB, would rather have the SMB and kind of planned the structure and depth of the pond more towards trying to help make them sustainable.

We will be catching and eating the bulk of the walleye as they get big and adding young ones to replace, also will be removing crappie year round hopefully for many fish fries. The walleye and hybrid white bass are just to keep young crappie and red ears from getting out of hand, along with the family harvesting bream.

I would like to be able to have the FHM and shiners reproduce annually as a good forage base.

Has anyone bought shiners overnight from Andersons Fish Farm? I’ve seen a few YouTube vids and it looked pretty easy to get them live delivered. Probably going to order a couple boxes of them this week.

I had a box delivered from Andersons this spring and was very impressed. Fish were in good shape and doing well when I got them and they've done well in the pond since. Lot's of little fry and more egg-filled females cruising the shallows right now.

Thanks!

I have had great success with GSH, there are some 5-6 ones in there after 3 years but they really deliver the forage for the SMB, YP, HBG and HSB. My pond is around 1/3 of and acre and it is full offspring, I can sit on the porch all day and watch random predators grabbing snacks. I think they're worth it over FHM if they have a place to hide and you mentioned structure is available.

So I ordered some minnow size and some 4" size last week. Overnight they were delivered to my door by noon next day! Technology kicks butt...I guess they drug them to make them sleepy fill bag with oxygen then put them in an insulated bag with ice packs.
Took them out to pond floated them in shade for almost a half hour then turned them loose and off they went. Had maybe twenty of the bigger ones dead and maybe five of the smaller...not bad for over 1400 shiners

Some pics to show how it went and the size:

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Hopefully in the next year or so they will look like this and be self sustaining keeping the SMB happy.

Yep, they have the raising and shipping part figured out.

A couple yrs ago I got a couple boxes of the fresh hatched fry delivered from Anderson farms, was extremely impressed, they were almost to small to see with the naked eye except for their eyes, they were swimming in literally a cloud and were very healthy and within days were growing significantly. they were my first fish in a new pond and within days there were tons of them visible in all the brush pile areas.