Stock Your Lake with the Best-Biting Bass, Crappie, Catfish and Bluegills
Day 3: Fertilize the Man-Eaters
Editor’s Note: Don Keller and Barry Smith are two research fishery scientists who have developed the Perfect Pond Plus fertilizer for fish and the man-eating Tiger Bass.
  With Perfect Pond Plus fertilizer for ponds and lakes, you can grow bigger, more-aggressive bass and bream in the ponds where you fish. Perfect Pond Plus can increase the productivity in your pond by 300 percent. Keller and Smith also have developed several-other steps to help you grow monster-size bass in a short time. When I asked Don Keller, “If I dig a pond on a property and fill it full of water, how quickly can I grow trophy-sized bass and trophy-sized bluegills?” Keller answered, “First, you need to choose the fastest-growing, most-aggressive bass and bluegills that you can find to stock your pond. Next, you need to determine the stocking rate that will give your fish the best opportunity to grow the quickest. At American Sport Fish Hatchery, we recommend you stock 30 bluegills for every bass you stock -1500 to 2000 bluegills per acre. We also recommend that you stock the same number of fathead minnows as you do bluegills.
“These bluegills and fathead minnows should be stocked in the fall and the winter. In the spring, begin to fertilize your lake with Perfect Pond Plus. In June of that same year, stock your bass at a rate of about 50 to 70 bass per acre. We recommend you put automatic feeders around your pond and set those feeders to go-off several times a day. Bluegills have small stomachs, so to get maximum growth rate, they need to be fed small amounts, several times a day, rather than a large amount once a day. The more food the bluegills eat, the fatter they’ll become, the more eggs they’ll produce, and the more offspring they’ll produce for the largemouth bass to eat. Using this system, we’ve seen bass grow at a rate of 2 or 3 pounds per year.
  “Also lakes that follow this prescription and stock them with Tiger Bass, a strain of largemouth bass developed by our company, generally produce 6-pound-plus Tiger Bass in 2 years. These fish are a strain of northern bass that were selected over 20 years for their aggression and a select strain of Florida bass that were chosen for their ability to produce offspring that grow to 10 pounds or more, rapidly. These fish get big quickly and bite aggressively. For instance, this past year (2011), we stocked 2-inch-long fingerling Tiger Bass in a lake and returned to that same lake in November of 2011. Those bass already weighed more than 2-pounds each. That’s phenomenal growth from May to November. These fish probably will be at least 3-pounds each in May, 2012. We’ve seen three bass caught out of one pond that followed this prescription and was stocked with Tiger Bass that weighed more than 14 pounds at 6-1/2-years of age. If the pond is larger than 5 acres, we recommend adding threadfin shad too. Some lakes never may have to be stocked with threadfin shad, while other lakes may need to be stocked every 3 or 4 years with these shad.”To learn more about Tiger Bass, go to http://www.americansportfish.com or call 334-281-7703.
 To learn more about how to catch every species of bass, get the new Kindle eBook, “How to Bass Fish Like a Pro” by John E. Phillips. click here. Or, you can go to http://www.amazon.com/kindle-ebooks and type-in the name of the book to find it. You can also download a free Kindle app that enables you to read the book on your iPad, computer or SmartPhone.
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