Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain My First

Good morning all.
One good thing about Texas drought and hot summers is two years ago I finally got my Father's permission to clean out a couple of small ponds that have not been maintained since they were built in the 50's.

My first was a small pond 65 yards x 90 yards at full level. Using a manually adjustable road blade on the back of a 125 horse John Deere tractor plus the front bucket and a small but not "mini" excavator and a trash pump I dug a sump at the deepest end and pumped the water out and began working the edges moving toward the center. Silted in is an understatement. I put the spoils on the back side of the dam to reinforce it.

I did not try to make the pond bigger, just clean it. Once it was cleaned out we eyeballed a taped up piece of PVC pipe, edge to edge at full line gave us a max depth of 14 feet. On the South bank using the blade I cut a three foot wide shelf for every two foot of depth for spawning beds and layered fine crushed limestone on top of them. We had some Live Oak trees come over in a storm and I cut the trunks off right below the first branch and topped the branches. I drug those to the middle of the pond and packed them as tight as they would allow. I used old hay straw and layered strips of hay 5 to 6 inches thick by 6 foot wide and 50 feet long over the natural runoff inlet. I ran chicken wire over that and used rebar 2 foot long with washers welded to the top to hold it all down.

Good thing I did because three months later we got a big storm that dropped 9 inches of rain in two days and it completely filled the pond. This was two years ago. I have been intermittently checking on the pond and a couple weeks ago I noticed lots of little bugs plus little tufts of Chara (unfortunately) starting to grow on the shelves I had cut into the South side. Yesterday I dropped three thousand fat head minnows in it to start growing and get naturalized to the pond. I am planning on going to one of the other ponds we have and with a fine dipnet try to get some PK Shrimp to put in there. My current plan is to let this pond sit for probably around another 14 months or so, then add red eared sunfish. There are no ponds upstream from this one and the neighbors are too poor to spend money on fertilizer or weed spray so chemical contamination is not a worry.

My Father was ecstatic with the work and thought I put into this project and he is excited about a sunfish only pond. (He LOVES to eat sunfish.) How do yall think I am doing so far and what do you think of my plan? Am I missing a step anywhere? Do you think I should add another forage supply for my future sunfish? I "think" I have the bases covered but any and all opinions, questions are greatly appreciated.

My apologies, I meant South facing (North) bank, not the south bank.

The oak trees might be a problem. Some members have put freshly-cut oak trees into their pond and suffered a fish kill. Others have done the same with no observable consequence.

The second problem is that it is very difficult to have a sunfish only pond! A female bluegill can lay 50,000 eggs during a single spawn, and she can spawn multiple times over the course of the year. By Year 2 or Year 3, you would need to be catching hundreds of bluegill every day. Otherwise your pond will be filled with skinny, stunted BG that don't grow much past 4-6".

Essentially all good BG catching/eating ponds also have a top predator to thin the huge population of small BG such that other BG have space and food to grow large. Frequently that predator is the largemouth bass, but there are other options.

There are lots of "stocking plan" experts on the forum. Hopefully, some will drop into your thread.

Congratulations on all of the work renovating your pond. It sounds like you have created great potential!

P.S. Which sunfish are you planning to stock? Bluegill, Redear Sunfish (maybe called shellcrackers in your area), or some of the wide variety of other species? If you add that to your post, then you will get some better advice.

The oak tops were added two years ago. I hope they are no longer a problem.

I didn't consider that the sun perch might overload themselves. Maybe after establishing a population I can add 10 or so blue catfish to keep them in check. I want healthy slabs for fillets, not stunted trash. I have cleaned many 5 to 7 inch sunfish in my life but I want this to be a gift to my Father in his later years. I want him to enjoy it and remember that his son did this for him.

What I want to grow is what we call Redear Sunfish. Never heard them called shellcrackers. I also am not any form of expert, so I could be calling them by the wrong name completely. I do look forward to any input anyone can share or advise me of. Since I have only stocked "bait" so far, there is still time to amend the plan.

Why are you waiting to add BG? I put some in my lake along with FHM in the original stocking and now nine months later there's enough of them that I'm about ready to add LMB. I do have a feeder going.

I am NOT one of our stocking plan experts. However, I will certainly keep chatting since many of best memories in life are fishing with my father and brother! I like your goals.

Yes, Redear Sunfish is the correct name, much preferred over a localized nickname that might complicate discussions. The good news is that they are generally much less prolific than Bluegill. (But will usually quickly populate a fertile pond.)

I am not sure that 10 blue catfish will be sufficient to control the population of the RES in a pond of greater than 1 surface acre. However, I think you can add another/more predators later if needed.

It does sound like you have some other ponds on your property to assist with your pond management? Do you have any with largemouth bass? One option would be to catch LMB right before the spawn and when you catch a female that is obviously full of eggs, you could transfer her to the new pond. If you had a female-only LMB pond with your RES, then you would have excellent control of the predator population. You could then add or remove female bass as needed based on the size and number distribution of RES in the pond.

Where did you get your fathead minnows? Did you like dealing with that fish supplier? I did see that Larry's Fish Farm (north of Giddings) does have RES in your area. You might call them now to see if they would have any available this fall if you were ready to stock then. (The little RES will eat all of the little bugs you are observing in the pond until they get large enough to eat the fathead minnows.) If you don't want to stock until next spring, you might ask them about the best calendar period for them to deliver RES.

We have lots of Texas pond owners in the forum. However, I can't recall any off of the top of my head as far southwest as you. However, it is hard to beat "local" advice if some of them drop into your thread.

Good luck on developing your family pond!

This is "my" project pond. We have many more on other properties that we regularly catch 5 pound plus large mouth bass and a couple that have (what must be) hundreds of stunted hybrid bluegill perch we use for bait. The same day I took the 3K fathead minnows to the project pond we put 300 pound each in three other ponds to help control the Chara (not the ponds with the stunted BG). Last year we added 20 blue cats to a pond that was over-run with stunted blue gills. We have semi-professional catfish fishermen come to collect bait that we give away for free. We have lots of fishing available on my Father's properties. What we dont have is a dedicated white crappie pond and a dedicated sunfish pond.

I am currently working on a white crappie pond on another portion of the ranch. Unfortunately I cannot drain this pond because it's primary purpose is watering livestock. I just want a little portion that I can say I did for my Dad and he can be with me always even after the inevitable And yes, his time is nigh, so I am wanting to do my best to produce the best to enjoy the best till that time. .

And we use Hennecke Fish Farms, Hallettsville, Tx.

Awesome news on having lots of pond options if you need some supplementing!

The RES are primarily sight-feeders and will do best in a fertile, but mostly clear-watered pond. Do your cattle actually enter this pond, or do you have a exit pipe to a tank?

If not, then I don't think your RES will thrive in a muddy pond. Your best bang for the buck may be creating one of the various ways of watering the cattle while still excluding them from direct access to the pond.

P.S. I hope you have good luck catching some PK Shrimp. I think if you get them well-established in your pond, then the RES will be happy to eat them.

Our cattle rarely get to this pond. Maybe once a year for a week at most. It is fenced off in a little trap next to the hunting cabin. Until I cleaned it, it was mainly to have something to look at.

Somehow in my previous post about adding "300 pounds", I didn't mention we added adult Talapia. Those ponds have a terrible Chara problem and we are trying anything but chemicals right now. May be forced to use chemicals if they dont work. We added them last year and they seemed to help but died in the freeze.

Love your plan, I love my RES. I bought 400 RES from an old and well known fish supplier, best I can tell , I may have gotten 150 RES, 250 BG and GSF. My advice + a dollar bill may get you cup of coffee, I would look at every SF you stock , secondly I would insist that all RES are a minimum of 4" long, otherwise you may have no idea what your stocking. Getting a mixed bag of SF when buying a particular fish species is not unusual. Me , today, maybe over kill, but I would insist on 4" minimum length, and would not buy more than I can hand sort in one setting. Next, IDK that Tilapia will harvest chara , great on Filamentous Algae , but not Chara, I'll stand, sit , and lay corrected if I'm wrong. Chara, also called Skunk Moss , crush it in your hand , smells like skunk spray ?

If it were me, I would lean more towards Red Eard Sunfish, they don't breed as crazy and still get really big and are great to eat.


Thank you for your service! 12B myself.

Tilapia at high density will eat all Chara that covers the entire bottom of a 0.6ac pond. If the pond has common to abundant FA the the tilapia will eat the FA first then start eating Chara. Use a grass carp to help control Chara and before and after tilapia are present.

In Texas if we use grass carp we have to put in protected overflows and spillways to ensure they cannot ger out of our pond in a flood. Fish and Game will hammer us hard if they get out and flow to a natural body of water. Kinda puts a kink in the whole thing.

Yep, and if your pond is subject to flooding you have to watch those fish exclusion devices so they don't get packed with debris and get washed out or bent over.

Does that Texas rule apply even to sterile triploid carp?

To my knowledge, that is the only kind that you can legally stock in Texas.