Every other year we raise a crop of crappie in the nursery pond. We put around 300 to 500 crappie in the pond in late winter. They reproduce that spring and we release them the following October/November. We estimate that we release around 300,000 to 500,000 crappie. The crop that we released this past November averaged 5 to 6 inches. That is pretty good growth for a crappie that is only half a year old. For comparison, crappie that we sample in the wild are more like 3 to 4 inches at this age.