Thread: Pond stocking?

On my new land i have a half acre pond.. it hold water well.. so well the epa guy made me run 200 yards of field lines to approve my septic....
Anywho.. there is alot of clay when it rains so the pond stays murky, there are ZERO fish in the pond.. no fry or minnows etc..
Is this because of the clay sediment? The pond is old.. probably 10 years or more and has been in the dense woods for a long time.

1: Has anyone ever used gypsum to clear a pond?
2: And will any fish do well in the murky water?
I want some green sunfish or something maybe bluegill and then possibly stock some channel cats. I plan to have a 55gal deer feeder there to feed them if they'll live.

Side note, we caught a bass minnow the other day from a local lake with a cup with the kids while we were playing around. its almost 2in long.. Kope my youngest son affectionately named him GEORGE... we have George on the counter in a small tank now.. and will release him as the 1st fish in the pond.. So Haywire, you can rest at ease knowing you have a future wall hanger with your namesake..

Tight lines and thanks in advance for any help on this..

LOL ... and I will name him George...

I’ve got a two acre pond on my place. It was also neglected for about ten years. It was deep enough but was always brown and murky,...and it had HUNDREDS of small Largemouth bass. They were so crowded that none of them got big. There were sunfish (brim) but not many,...the bass ate them all.

I did a LOT of reasarch and visited some folks in the fisheries department here at Auburn (Perk of living in a college town, haha) and got a plan together. The easiest is to drain and start over. I didn’t want to do that. The second plan involved getting as many of those bass out of there as possible. I fished for three years and took between twenty and fourty pounds of bass out each year. Things have improved to the point where I caught a five pounder this fall.

As for the muddy/murky water,...the solution was pretty straightforward. The PH was wrong. With the right PH the solids will coagulate and settle. If the PH is wrong the solid particles repel each other and stay in suspension. The solution for me was 20 tons of agricultural lime. I had a local pond management place do it with a barge and they spread it evenly across the pond. It had an immediate effect. The pond now clears up really quick after a rain You can do the same with a bag or two of Hydrated lime and set it on a pallet in shallow water and let the wave action disperse it. It’s just that agricultural lime particles last for years and the hydrated powdered lime has to be redone more often.

The other thing I did was to fertilize the pond. Seems counterintuitive but the fertilizer promotes growth of the small organisms that are the start and basis of the food chain. The type of fertilizer matters as well as the amount. Use a type made for ponds.

The pond greened up and things got back to a good balance. I weaned it off the fertilizer after three years and now the pond is doing well. I also added some sterile carp to keep any weeds down,..even though i didn’t really have weed problem.

As for stocking....DO NOT use Green sunfish. They’ll take over and you’ll have nothing but them in there, and they’ll stay small due to crowding. Once you get your PH right and the pond looks good, I’d look into getting a bass and sunfish mix. Then you can add catfish later. Catfish won’t reproduce in most ponds due to not having the right nesting areas, and also the fry tend to stay in a bait ball that regroups after an attack and the bass just annihilate them. You’ll have to get ones large enough so the bass won’t eat them. You can build a floating cage to keep em in while you feed them to size. I made one out of an old trampoline mesh and some PVC pipe.

Check out the website called “pond boss” and you’ll find a lot of good info.

I planted bluegill and sunfish in my pond 2 years ago. They reproduce like crazy. I released a single largemouth last year that was about 17", but it's not making a huge dent in the panfish population. I'll hopefully be adding to the bass population this summer and using the small panfish as catfish bait in the local river.
The muddy water (from the red clay here) almost never clears up. It takes 3 or 4 almost windless days and weather patterns like that just don't happen here. The poor water clarity doesn't seem to bother the fish at all.
Does the pond have any water plants or is it strictly wind aerated?

Catfish are cool but a half acre is small in the pond world. If you plan the pond for fun and not for eating, a handful of sterile (non-reproducing) sunfish is a great alternative for keeping the size structure of the panfish from stunting while adding sport. However the real key is a balance of predators (bass) and prey (sunfish).

Fordguy Its got 3 single lilly pads and nothing else live in it

You don’t need actual plants in a pond for aeration. In fact, most plants get to be invasive and overcrowd the pond and need to be controlled. Lilly pads will usually cover the entire pond surface eventually if left alone. The oxygen needed is best generated by small microorganisms,...they’re what make a healthy pond a shade of green. They make oxygen all day when the sun’s shining.
Promoting their growth will negate the need for artificial oxygenation.

Originally Posted by SteveH

You don’t need actual plants in a pond for aeration. In fact, most plants get to be invasive and overcrowd the pond and need to be controlled. Lilly pads will usually cover the entire pond surface eventually if left alone. The oxygen needed is best generated by small microorganisms,...they’re what make a healthy pond a shade of green. They make oxygen all day when the sun’s shining.
Promoting their growth will negate the need for artificial oxygenation.

Thanks for the tip. The pond is looking better lately now that we opened the area up to the sun...
Now if i can just get the excavator out again to make it bigger😁

Lol. My pond is a healthy shade of orange-brown, but the wind almost never stops blowing here, and I have some pond weeds (unidentified) but not many. Planning on some lillys and cattails this year. My biggest problem is the large number of cormorants that I watch taking fish after fish on a daily basis.

You will likely regret adding cattails and Lilly pads to any small pond.
They’ll take over. Don’t take my word for it,...google it up and you’ll see.

Best to promote planktonic algae. It’s the basis of the food chain.
You get that right, and the pond will take off.
https://extension.psu.edu/pond-algae-its-not-all-bad