Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking I Have a Plan… Almost

Hey everyone, following all the great advice given on my first post (Glad to be Here), I have a plan for my pond this year. Would love for you all to take a good a give me some feedback, as well as fill the few remaining holes.

Current situation:
- My pond is approx 1/3 acre that’s from 1-8 feet deep. It’s roughly shaped like a long triangle, very shallow on the long tip and deeper at the wide base.
- I have lots of pondweed. Not much FA, thankfully.
- I’ve already removed almost all my LMB and have some midsized BG from last year

The Plan:
1. Add more adult BG (shooting for around 350 total adult BG in pond)
2. Add Pumpkinseed sunfish to the pond. My reading on the forums says that they eat differently than BG and won’t compete. They spawn often and we have tons of them around here. Seems like a good way to spruce up the forage buffet.
3. Add 40-50 mid to large YP. Some of them will get eaten, but if some can spawn that would be great. I like fishing for and eating perch. My bass will like them too.
4. Add 250,000 GSH fry from Anderson
5. Continue culling all LMB aggressively through the pre spawn period to give the forage species a head start in their reproduction.
6. Add some smaller LMB back into the pond around fall. Is this a good idea, or should I wait until next year?


Questions:
1. Weed management - right now there is pondweed growing almost everywhere in the pond. We attack it with cutters and remove it…but I want to leave some this year for my baby fish. What depth should I leave un-raked? What will they most readily utilize?
2. Feeding - I’m still trying to convince my wife it’s a wise use of money to feed our fish. Can you give me an estimate of how much I would need to feed them, ideally? I can buy Aquamax locally at Tractor Supply for $1 a pound. Roughly what would I be looking at cost wise for the season?
3. Aeration - right now I have none. I’m not overly concerned with summer night kills, but winter kill is a serious concern. Right now, we have probably 12” of ice covered by a foot or so of snow. Just read a PB article about allowing sunlight into the pond and letting gasses out. Right now neither is happening. Am I wasting my time and money growing out this pond without aerating over the winter? I’m hesitant to do it because my kids like to play on the ice during the winter and the aeration would prevent that. The pond isn’t really big enough to follow the 50 foot rule safely.
4. Habitat - I need a lot of work here. Besides the weeds, my pond doesn’t have much… and I want to fix it. I’m pretty familiar with what LMB need, but I’d like to help provide what the BG and others need. Any help here would be appreciated. I’ve looked at many of the threads about habitat, but haven’t really been able to solidify my plan.

Thanks so much everyone!!

To my knowledge, I've only seen the Pumpkinseeds spawn once a year, towards the end of May or beginning of June.

My answers to your questions.
1) The smaller the fish, the shallower the water. Typically they stick to 4' deep or less. during most of the summer.
2) Or Optimal Food and have it shipped to you. You most likely won't go through more than 2-3 bags this year, it's all up to you. You can feed as little or as much as you like per day, as long as they eat all you give them within 15 minutes of throwing it in the pond.
3) You can aerate. You need roughly 1/10th of the surface area open. Do it in the long narrow finger and string up barrier tape from shoreline to shoreline. After the first year you will see how close you can set the barrier tapes. 1/4 hp compressor, 1 diffuser will be enough. Or go with two, one in the deepest water that you shut off for the winter.
4) Dense cover near the spawning beds. Openings that are small enough to discourage the LMB from going into the cover after them. You want 20%-25% of the pond in cover, in all areas of the pond, deep water to shallow water. They will utilize the deep water,

Can you explain why you are working hard to get the LMB out and then you plan to stock more soon after?

Since LMB are the most difficult mouths to keep fed, you probably cannot take out enough of them, unless you can also prevent the ones you didn't get out from successful spawning. They have no other predator except you culling them. In a 1/4 or 1/3 acre pond the right number of mixed sex LMB might be 4 or 6. It might be hard for you to know exactly how many are left so it is wise to keep culling.

If you could be sure you had only girl LMB that would be a different story. 6 LMB need 60 pounds of bluegill to grow one pound.

I'm a big fan of optimal food and would put in a plug for ordering some. Since you are trying to build forage and add pumpkinseed, I would consider a bag of each the Bluegill and the Bluegill JR sizes and mix them 50/50 and then rebag them. This gives a variety of pellet sizes for all comers in your pond.

Aeration is very helpful in many ways.

Pumpkinseed are a pretty fish. If you can find them, go for it! They won't overpopulate and will help control any snails that might show up in your pond.

Canyoncreek,

Why am I culling bass, and planning to restock them? When I moved onto this property, the pond was full of stunted bass. I've been culling them over the last year because they're obviously unhealthy (under fed to a gross extent). I would ultimately love to have some healthy bass in the pond so my kids can catch them occasionally, but I feel like I need to "reset" the bass population. Get rid of what we have (as much as I can), then slowly let the numbers increase with healthy fish. Does that make sense?

I'm surprised by that number of LMB you gave me (4-6). That's so few... was hoping to be able to sustain a population of 20 or so at least.

I live right by Lake Ontario, which is positively brimming with PS. I can catch a dozen or more of them off the docks in my local bay any time I want. That's where my stock will come from.

I kept (20)+ LMB in a 1/4 acre pond, with the average weight of the LMB between 3-4 lbs.

I was also feeding heavily.

Without artificial feed, I think you would not see such great growth rates.

Keep in mind that the artificial feed is also for the bluegill.....the healthier they are, the stronger their spawns.

Sunil, that is a very helpful data point!

One thing to consider is that a fish has a finite life span, BUT they grow continually up to the very end. So, it's better to have a 10" LMB in the pond that is 9-10 months old than one that is 5 years old.

Plus removing as many of the smaller, stunted LMB as possible gives whatever forage fish that are stocked a better chance of surviving and reproducing.

Just to be clear... There were probably another 50+ LMB in the same pond, just smaller than those (20) I mentioned. I had bucket stocked (5) LMB in the pond prior to getting the (20) LMB from Zett's Fish Farm. The (20) LMB were 3-5" when I put them in. So, all the LMB had spawned for multiple seasons.

The feed made all the difference. This pond is a real sim-world.

Sunil, I’m concerned that if I push this pond too hard I’ll get a fish kill due to the shallowness of the pond and the intensity of our winters.

Would you agree, or am I too worried over nothing?

It's tough to say. The pond I'm referring to is my neighborhood retention pond, and it's really less than 6-7' most of the year.

It get's a lot of surface wind action, plus any time we get rain, it gets a lot of fresh water from the neighborhood roads.

The real x-factor is the artificial feed.

Thanks for the additional info. I was impressed that your pond was supporting twenty 3-4 pounders. Even more impressive to support an entire range of LMB.

Dan, it sounds like you have read a few of the horror stories on Pond Boss about crashes where people pushed their pond limits too far.

If you are going to push, then that makes aeration a must for your pond.

However, I believe most of the crashes were during summer heat waves in warmer locales(?). [Someone correct me if that is wrong.]

You might possibly have a winter crash at your location. Do you have the capability/time to sweep off the snow after you get deep cover on top of ice? Can you check often enough to ensure that your aeration opening does not ice over?

When I start my similar "small pond" project, I am going to try to push the limits a little.

I suspect if you get worried about carrying too much bass weight in your pond, you can find some kids/buddies/neighbors to help you cull some LMB with rod and reel!

Anytime you might think you are pushing the envelope I would feel much more secure with an aeration system. Summer fish kills are typically from O2 crashes in the wee early morning hours right before sunrise. Phytoplankton and plants utilize O2 during the night along with the fish. Phytoplankton and plants win over fish if the O2 gets too low. Running the diffusers at night help minimize the O2 drop. Shallower ponds need more diffusers than deeper ponds, just because the area of influence that each airstation covers is smaller with shallower water.

If it's a shallow pond, less than 7-8 feet deep you are better during the summer running a paddlewheel agitator than a bottom diffusion airstation. During the winter, a single airstation set at 1/3 the total pond depth is enough in ponds under an acre. All you need is a max of 1/10th the surface area ice free.

esshup, thanks for adding some expert commentary on the topic!

I thought that the oxygenation efficiency of a diffusion air station exceeded that of the paddle wheel agitators.

If that is correct(?), would another option be to have a winter diffuser location and a summer location that is optimized for the pond depth and configuration?

Nope, it's the other way around in a shallow pond. Now a deep pond is is a wee bit different but that is only because the upper and lower water layers don't mix with just a paddle wheel. If you really want to pump up the O2 levels, you can run both. I had a customer that did that, it wasn't a paddle wheel, it was a volcano type surface agitator. It wasn't this, but this is the same principle.



We had the bottom diffusion system running and he ran that agitator 24/7. I think it was a 5hp one in a 3/4 ac pond, 5' of muck on the bottom, 8' of water in the pond. In the middle of July he still had trout alive even though the water temp was in the upper 70"F range. O2 was at 150% saturation.

I’m not concerned about summer kills because I have a fountain that runs 24/7 during the spring, summer, and fall. We only shut it off over the winter.

Also, I am going to try training the bluegills to eat pellets. We’ll see how that goes.

We’ll leave some of the pondweed in place in the shallower areas for the young BG and PS.

What else do I need to definitely do this year?