Thanks, CC!

As far as my goal for stocking the pond, I mainly just want to keep it healthy. I don't care about raising trophy fish filling the freezer. Don't get me wrong, I love to fish, but mostly for relaxation, not for specific results.

At this point I am planning to stock a mix of bluegill, sunfish, LMB, of course FHM and a few grass carp. After explaining my goals to the fishery they recommended stocking all at once but stocking the predators in a small enough size that that the forage fish would still be ok to get established. I will say that through our building process here I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of other local pond owners and this fishery was highly regarded by all of them and the fishery staff did ask a lot of questions about my goals before making a recommendation. Thoughts?

The pond has no connection to other bodies of water and at this point contains only some crawdads that were already here on the property. Not sure if they appreciated the improvement, but one did come out to greet me while I was cleaning a bit of straw from the water's edge.

My windmill stands 27' tall and with the flat farm field around our property it catches a wind from the west a pretty good amount of the time. We knew it wasn't necessarily the ideal aeration system, but we loved the idea of a windmill on the property for aesthetic reasons so we figured why not attempt to let it have a practical application. It currently runs a single diffuser but I ran the line such that I could easily add to it if necessary. The pond is between 9 and 10 feet deep and the diffuser sits about 16" off the bottom.

I'll plan to get a couple of updated pictures tomorrow. Thanks in advance for any in insights you're willing to share!