Rabbit Feeding

I don't feed my rabbits pellets. Rabbit pellets, like dog food, are fairly recent on the scene and animals have done fine without them for thousands of years previously. Also, rabbit pellets must be purchased.

Instead, I feed my rabbits good quality hay and assorted greens and vegetables. With ten rabbits instead of two, I find that my yard does not provide enough greens for the bunnies. In addition to what my own property supplies, I forage for them on empty land (caveat: to be entirely on the legal side of the fence, you have to have permission from the property owner to do this, even if you are technically removing invasive weeds).

In springtime, the pickings are easy. In the Central Valley, where we live, springtime runs from about November to March. It's been summer for a while, no matter what the calendar says. Plus, most landownders plow the land in late spring as the weeds start to dry out. Pickings now are slimmer.

Favorites at this time include wild grape as well as the weeds below.

This is purslane. As a succulent, it contains a lot of water, which helps keep bunnies hydrated in hot weather. Also, people can eat it, though I haven't tried.

In the center of the photo above is sow thistle. It starts growing early in the year and is going to seed now. However, the plant stays green even while the seeds are ripe (unlike the trusty mustard family plants the rabbits were eating earlier in the year).

This is prickly lettuce, the forebears of our familiar salad green. They are also starting to go to seed at this time, though they will dry out as their seeds ripen. The bunnies especially seem to love the flower buds at the top of the stalk.

Chicory is a relative of the dandelion, familiar and also beloved of bunnies. I find chicory difficult to identify until it flowers. It has beautiful blue flowers, unlike anything else growing in this area right now. It will bloom through the summer, so I am looking forward to harvesting more of it for the bunnies. When it flowers, it sends up long, leafless stalks for the blooms, with the leaves as a clump at the bottom. Since the rabbits like the leaves best, I pull the whole clump.

These greens help augment what I feed the bunnies out of my own garden, like squash leaves, late radish leaves, dandelions, grasses and clover.

Harvest Monday May 23

There was not much harvesting going on in my garden this week. These radish pods, which went into another bento, were from last week. Still yummy, though. Cooking takes the heat out of them. The hot weather lately has made the pods really spicy!


This did come from my garden, though. The first garlic bulb I've harvested this year (other than green garlic). I didn't wait for it to cure, just cleaned it, quartered it, and tossed it into a pot with some rosemary and my two farmers market artichokes. I will have those for dinner tonight. It smells divine in the kitchen right now.



This was the most exciting harvest of the week. Our awesome neighbors let us come over and pick cherries from their tree. Some were gobbled up immediately. Some I gave to my mom. The rest (about 13 lbs) got mashed up and are in the process of becoming wine.

The most exciting news of the week: Babs kindled today, while I was at work. Before I left in the morning, she was carrying around a mouthful of hay obsessively. While I was gone, she finished up her nest, lined it masterfully with fur, and had her babies. I counted at least three, but she seemed kind of upset with me, so I didn't dig around any further. She seems to be doing just fine as a mommy, but I'll keep a close eye on her.

This week's totals:

13 lbs cherries from neighborhood tree

2.5 oz garlic

Bunny Tales

We decided to take out the big cypress bush that separates our property from our Santariano neighbors. Matt cut down the branches, and I was up this morning cutting them into more manageable pieces. I looked up from my work to see Babs come around the corner of our back fence.

How in the world did Babs get out? So I followed her, offering her favorite foods - the thick stems of barnyard grass, the flower buds of arugula. She sniffed them, but didn't eat, didn't allow me to get close enough to pick her up. Still, she wasn't afraid of me, just led me at a leisurely hop from the neighbor's yard to their parked truck back under the tree at the property line, into our yard and back, in a little pingpong route. I could see where she'd dug the dirt up under the fence right on the other side of where her hutch is in the garden, but it didn't look like there was a hole all the way through. How on Earth did she get out?

Finally, she gave up and let me catch her. I brought her back to our backyard to put her in her hutch, but she was already there! This was another bunny, the same size, with the same black and white markings, lacking only the kiss on her forehead that the real Babs has.

So right now she is enjoying hay and water in Mya's dog crate. I kind of wish I had some emergency pellets on hand. Now we just have to find her owner.