raising minnows in pond

[Kevin22]

Turtles are going to cut right through that fabric to get to your minnows, and the pumpkinseeds are going to eat your minnows.

Drain the pond. A pond that small you can drain in 1 day by renting a gas water pump. Drain the sucker and let it dry, and pick out the turtles. Fill it back up and wait a few weeks before adding your minnows. Then use minnow traps to catch your daily use of minnows and return the extras back to your pond.

[cricket george]

The pink minnows are called rosie reds and are a color phase of a fathead. They will spawn 4-6X/season depending on your location in the country. I rotenoned my pond to clear all the fish them added 2-3 bales o any type of hay to add nutrients as it rotted. Suspend some shipping pallets in the water with Styrofoam to allow the fatheads to have a spawning structure. It also keeps the crawdads from canabalizing the minnow eggs. Tie the floating structures to opposite banks to stabilize the pallets. Add a gallon of fatheads or rosies to the pond in March so they will start spawning as soon as the water warms. Mine start in March and quit in September. Your pond could have close to .75 to 1.0 million minnows by fall. You will be giving them away by next spring just to keep them in check. This is based on a 1/4 acre pond. Been there done that.

[Crewmax42]

We have a small decorative pond in front of the house. It is about 8 feet in diamter and has about 8 large pond comets and two koi. We have been dumping out leftover minnows the past five or six outings. We harvested six or seven dozen since wee started, but the past couple of tries, we seined no minnows. We think the comets are eating them. I think it is best to have a separate tank or pool. I don't even care about breeding. I just hate losing what I have paid for.

[Crewmax42]

My wife informed me that, during feeding, there were a slew of minnows coming up. So, the cold water probably kept them out of our unmbrella seine..