Thanks for the advice. This is all great info. I replenish brush both shallow and deep every year or at least every other year in the form of cedar trees in the shallows and big oak limbs out deep. I have great structure all throughout the pond. When we were building the pond they were taking up a sidewalk in town and we got 4 dump truck loads of the giant pieces of sidewalk and we took our tracto around and made a few piles out deep and also stacked them together in several places up shallow. We also took a couple areas that had decent sized trees and cut them off about 5’ tall and left the stumps and 5’ of the trunk in the ground. Those seem to be holding up great even after 20 years.

The alkalinity was around 30 earlier this summer when a friend of mine checked it who works for a pond management company. I am already planning on liming this winter. It’s been about 8 years since we last limed. I still have the floating dock in the pond to barge the lime around on.

I have heard some horror stories about gizzards. I’m going to keep adding crawfish a couple times a summer and work on getting a better bloom next year after I lime this fall. Hopefully I’m back on track with the bluegill reproduction. I should be able to tell in a couple more weeks when the fry keeps growing.

Do any of you guys suggest harvesting big bluegill from time to time? Or just leave them all alone? I was thinking about this in terms of total carrying capacity of the pond. Just trying to wrap my head around everything. Some of my larger bluegill are 9+ inches.

I’m not sure how to share a picture on here or I would show you guys a couple of the bass we have grown over 10 pounds.