Mary Allen
Not only cats and dogs like to be served high-quality and tasty food, but this also applies to small animals. Rabbits have a keen and differentiated sense of taste. For example, you can even taste small differences in the composition and quality of hay and decide on preferred varieties. Read here how you can pamper your animals with healthy food and make rabbit food yourself.
What are the Advantages of Homemade Rabbit Food?
If you can grow and harvest the ingredients for the rabbit menu yourself, that is a great advantage: you can be absolutely sure that the feed is fresh, you know where it comes from and that no chemical pesticides have been used; Even if you are self-sufficient, you should avoid this in the interests of the rabbits. If you do not have the opportunity to fetch green fodder from your own meadow or from the vegetable patch, you can of course access purchased fodder – but choose organic goods. With herbs and grass, please make sure that you are not harvesting next to a road, from a dog meadow, or the verge of a field that is being sprayed. If you know your rabbits well, you will soon find out which food components they particularly like and which less. So you can design the menu in a very targeted manner and have fewer leftovers to dispose of.
How Can I Grow and Collect Rabbit Food Myself?
The majority of healthy rabbit food consists of grasses and herbs. With a little horticultural skill, you can easily stock up on both yourself. As a garden owner, you should plan a corner of your garden for a rabbit meadow. In garden centers, there are ready-made seed mixtures that contain especially the herb and meadow plant seeds popular with rabbits: marigold, chamomile, borage, cornflower, and others.
When you grow such forage plants, you are also doing something good for the environment by providing bees, butterflies, and other insects with attractive foraging areas. On such a “rabbit meadow” the animals can eat directly, or you can pick the portions they need every day. If you don’t have a garden, grow culinary herbs on the balcony or window sill. You can even plant annual forage flowers from seeds on the balcony.
Fruit and vegetables that rabbits can tolerate can easily be found in your own vegetable garden. The harvest of fresh branches is a little more difficult: branches of apple and pear trees, hazelnuts, and various berry bushes are well-tolerated forage plants, but they do not occur in every garden. Other varieties are also popular, but can only be fed in moderation. In order to ensure the supply of fresh twigs, it makes sense to establish contact with a nursery together with other rabbit keepers.
How Do I Preserve Flowers and Herbs?
Before fresh green fodder becomes scarce in the winter months, it is worthwhile to stock up on dried herbs that you can use to spice up the hay later. Drying herbs is very simple: to do this, spread the plant material in an airy but dark place, for example, in the attic; place paper or paper towels underneath. You can also hang the herbs in bunches upside down on a line so that they can get air from all sides. The herbs are completely dry when the leaves and stems break easily. Do not dry herbs in the blazing sun or under artificial heat such as in the oven: valuable aromatic substances are lost in the process.
For storing dried herbs and flowers, it is best to use metal containers such as cookie jars, which you line with kitchen paper. Plastic cans or bags are not suitable: Residual moisture cannot escape from them, which is a target for mold to attack. Keep the jars of herbs in a dark and dry place. Caution: Do not feed any plant material or hay that is too crumbled or dusty. If the rabbit ingests too many small particles, it will not pass through the digestive tract properly and this can lead to an intestinal overload. You can also make hay yourself, although the effort is relatively high: Mow tall grass from an area that does not contain any rabbit-dangerous plants. Be sure to use a scythe or sickle, not a lawnmower, because the stalks must keep their length. Then dry the clippings on a clothes horse or a frame covered with a net or aviary wire: the grass must not come into contact with the ground. Drying must take place outdoors or on a covered area, never in an enclosed space. The hay must not get wet while it is drying. So wait for rain-free weather with the grass clippings.
Can I Cook for My Rabbits?
Do you have another hobby besides your rabbits and love to be creative in the kitchen? Then surprise the long-ears with homemade rodent biscuits. As a special treat, carrot cookies are a popular change on the rabbit menu.
You need:
- grated carrots;
- chopped peanuts;
- millet;
- broken corn;
- peeled sunflower seeds of 50 grams each;
- an egg;
- a teaspoon of water.
Mix all the ingredients together and shape them into flat cookies in the right format for the rabbits, about the same diameter as a euro coin. Place the cookies on a baking sheet lined with baking paper and bake them at 180 ° C for about 10 to 12 minutes until they are golden brown. But be careful: these cookies are very energetic. Give your bumblers only one per day and reduce the dry food ration at the same time.
