Maybe a silly question but I have a new pond and I was wondering how to keep turtles and frogs from my pond? Also what can I do to reduce mosquito around the pound. Thanks for any advice.

To reduce frogs, Minimize weeds and have a healthy largemouth bass population. I don't know about turtles.

Mosquitos generally come from standing water and not from ponds with fish.

Don't sweat the turtles. Other than shooting them, there's not much you can do to discourage them. All in all, they don't cause a problem and are the clean up crew for dead or weak fish. Whats the problem with the frogs?

No problem but the pond is a swimming hole also and the daughter doesn’t like the idea of frogs.

Time for a teaching moment. Frogs eat adult mosquitoes (wherever they come from) which she might like even less than frogs.

They are part of a healthy ecology in a pond.

Turtles are the vultures of a pond and should be encouraged, certainly not harmed.

Turtles are aware, as is every other species of wildlife, of any change in their surroundings. When I walk up to my pond, every living thing seems to know I'm there. I was amazed when I realized that everything is so extremely alert.

Trying to remove frogs and turtles from a pond is like trying to remove ants from your lawn. You will need to destroy the ecosystem to manage it, and they will keep coming back anyways. A portion of the frogs you see today wont be there tomorrow as they will be off hunting or moved to another nearby water hole. They constantly are on the move at night.

Your daughter is going to need to learn to live with them if she wants to swim. Sign her up for a local nature class or something to get her hands on and more people to show her there is nothing to be afraid of.

Snakes on the other hand... we are currently hosting as very large 4.5ft northern water snake. Probably a mama. I am the only one who will go in the water right now, as that thing swam along side me out to the float dock the other day. They are admittedly creepy. I near shat myself.

I didn't want to start a new thread and this one seems relevant to my question->

Do you need to stock frogs and snails when starting up a new pond? Or just the fish and let the small stuff find their own way in?

Dont know how fast snails will populate but if frogs find a waterhole, pond with no big predator fish in it they will populate your pond in huge numbers in the first year probably.

You don't find frogs - frogs find you.
Snails carry parasites and disease, people usually buy fish that target them if they got them.

Good point, so there are no 'good snails' to stock then?

So essentially you

Build the pond and let it fill
Add vegetation
Add pond fertilzer
Add forage fish (and crawdads?) and let them spawn once or twice
Add big boy fish

In that order-ish?

Snails, like frogs, will show up on there own. Don't worry about stocking them. The little harmless parasites (yellow or black grubs) that you commonly see in the flesh or on the scales of freshwater fish use snails as part of their life cycle...

Grub on fish...bird eats fish, bird poops in pond, grub babies get back into the water and find a snail to live on/in, grub matures and transfers to fish...repeat!

Your plan is pretty solid.

You could add your forage fish when the pond is half full or so. This might gain you some forage reproduction depending on how fasts it fills.

Adding fertilizer may not be necessary. I never have, but it depends on your water and goals.

Adding crawdads can be a good adventure...I'm on the fence about mine, but still liking that I have them. I would advise stocking them at the same time as the big boy fish depending...meaning...stock crawdads that will be too big for the game fish to eat their first year in the pond. Crawdads, around here, only reproduce once a year in the spring. So, if you stock crawdads (even at a rate of 25/acre) a year before you stock fish and if they reproduce well...the new big boy fish (assuming that they are fingerlings) may not get big enough to control the craw recruits and you'll end up with a lot of craws that get out ahead of the stocked gamefish. This could result in too many craws. One crawdad turns into 500 without predation. Don't ask me how I learned this lesson. If you do decide to try craws...put plenty of rip-rap rock along some of the bank from the dry ground down to at least a foot of water. I would say 10 to 25% of the shoreline. To many craws will likely eat any veggies that try to start growing. They really like the submerged plant varieties at my place. The emergents do much better, but both are good for a pond. I cannot get any type of the submerged varieties growing in my pond as the craws devour them and they keep the water pretty muddy so the bottom of the pond does not get any sun. Here's the catch, craws have very good benefits (they like to eat FA and they provide good food for the fish), but they also have negatives (they also like to eat your desired plants and can muddy the water in high numbers)...finding that balance may be more up to mother nature than you. Enough on crawdads...for now!

build a beach....for 2 reasons...frogs and turtles don't hang out on sand. Most turtles would rather lay eggs in sand than other shoreline, when they lay, remove the eggs - population control. You can also easily net painted turtles - they take very quickly to being fed fish food, to the point that they will swar to you on a feeding schedule - if you really want to get rid of them, dip net the turtles during feed time and relocate them to another place. Don't kill the turtles - some people, like me, enjoy having them around as they do keep your pond clean.

Bass eat frogs, a lot of frogs, so do raccoons. chances are most of the fish in your pond will eat frog eggs or tadpoles, tadpoles eat FA - think of them as free fish food. They're also territorial so only allowing them a small area of ideal habitat will limit the amount of frogs on your pond.