Hi! Excited to find this forum, we dug our pond the week before Christmas and stocked today with Coppernose Bluegill & 10% Redear Shellcracker (250 total) channel cats,(100) Tripoli’s grass carp (2) And 1,000 fathead minnows! We will be adding 32 bass in June

The pond surface area is just over 1/4 acre

We know it will be a little bit of work..... but excited to have fish for our two grandkids to catch (2yr & 12yr)

If it ever dries out we will dress up the edges....

Exited to read and learn!

NANCY

Congrats on the new pond, and welcome to Pond Boss!

Welcome to Pond Boss, Nancy! Do you plan to feed the fish?

Thanks!

Thanks anthropic -

we had the water tested and it was great except for needing lime. Trying to find out how long after stocking we need to wait to add lime. We know based on the size of the pond and water test we need to add 250lb of Dolomitic lime.

We do plan on feeding them.

You can add agg lime anytime wrt fish except don’t throw it on them when bedding.

Good warning! The first time I tried to throw it from my bed it went everywhere except the pond.

Good to know on both counts! We will be spreading from a kayak unless we go get our canoe from our son....... it will probably be very entertaining!

Just wanted to post an update....

We put the lime in the pond..... nothing happened so I’m taking that as a good sign. Will do another water test this fall.

The pond filled up and was running over the spill way.... since it is only fed from ground springs we weren’t sure where “full” was going to be..... we ended up changing the spill way and added to the pond. Now we are at .36 acres. The deepest part is 15’.

We were able to dress up pond edges and place some “sitting” rocks around the edges in a few places. We planted grass two weeks ago and it has a little bit of a green today..... just wished we would get a light rain.

The RES and BG have started really hitting the fish food hard in the evenings. (We throw out by hand). Today we saw a ton of baby FHM swimming around..... didn’t realize that we would have anything spawn this year!!!

Planning on stocking LMB the middle of next month. We had a ton of tadpoles a few weeks ago at the edges.....

Love sitting around the pond in the evenings and watch the fish eating and the birds flying around!!

Thanks for all the help that I have received from this site..... both from me asking questions and by searching past post!

Sounds like things are going good! It is a lot of fun watching life grow in a new pond!

Things ARE looking up! With all that water flowing through the pond, I'd look at the alkalinity and hardness in 2 months and compare the numbers to before you added the lime. You might need to add more lime quicker than you thought.

Thanks! I will do that!