This time last year I was writing about all the rabbit safe plants that I found in my garden for Scamp to enjoy. I’ve been picking leaves again and Scamp’s been enjoying them, but I know shortly autumn will turn them all pretty colours and that will be it for tasty leaves until next spring. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was some way to store them up so Scamp could eat them all year around? Well, maybe there is. My experiment with making my own hay proved that it was possible to store tasty summer grass for eating later (I’ve made several more batches since), so why not do the same with other plants.

I started by collected a pile of tasty looking leaves. Look for green healthy looking ones without blemishes (or bugs) and collect them on a dry day.

Dandelion, thistle, strawberry, hazel, ginko, raspberry & basil leaves

Don’t forget to get your bunnies approval, there is not point going to the trouble of drying and storing leaves your bunny won’t eat. Scamp gives all these a pass on the taste test. I divided my pile in two, half for his supper and half to dry out.

Just checking the flavour!

The leaves for drying, the ones Scamp hadn’t eaten, I spread out on a tea tray on top of a couple of sheets of kitchen roll:

Then I popped them in the airing cupboard where it is warm and dry. I wasn’t sure how long it would take, but it was surprisingly fast! In just 4 days they looked like this:

It’s surprising how much they shrink! The Ginko leaves (which are thicker) needed a couple more days but everything else was dry and crispy. But the big question is, do they still pass the bunny taste test?

The answer is yes, Scamp seems just about as excited about dry leaves and the fresh ones. So I’m going to be drying a lot more leaves to provide tasty, home grown, rabbit food full of vitamins and completely free!

Other was to Dry Plants for Your Rabbit

There are several ways to dry out leaves for storage:

• Leave them somewhere warm and dry like I did … I put mine in the airing cupboard! It takes 4-5 days to dry them out.
• Lay them out outside and let the sunshine do the work. The drawback is you need sunshine! You may want to stretch a bit of clear plastic above them to keep the rain off.
• Use your oven. You can dry leaves in an oven on the lowest heat setting, or better yet, save energy and just use the leftover heat after you’ve cooked something. The downside is you can’t fit much in at once and something can be a little stinky. I doesn’t take long though (about 15minutes), we did this with Scamp’s first greens when he was a tiny baby.

My bunny book is with the printer, so it’s time to relax and have some fun! We’ve had a sack of children’s play balls sitting in the garage for ages so I thought I’d see what Scamp thought. They are the sort of balls you find in ball pits so they are quite soft plastic and very light. They wouldn’t stand up to chewing but are cheap and good for nudging about.

As you can see, the pesky balls are all in the wrong place and need rearranging and rearranging, and shouldn’t that yellow one go on the left instead.

And for those that like live action rabbits, a quick video too:

I’ve got some exciting news! I’ve been plugging away at a book on bunny behaviour for ages and now it’s almost done.

Looking for treats or ready to attack, what do you think?

I have finished drawing the 100 or so pictures of bunnies jumping, stretching, sleeping, eating, washing, fighting, grazing and doing all the other things bunnies do. There are just a couple touch ups to finish. Trying to draw the difference between a rabbit that feeling a bit nervous and one that’s demanding nose rubs, for example, is certainly a good way to make you think about subtle rabbit body language. It’s amazing how many different emotions rabbits convey by just adjusting the angle of their ears.

To go with the pictures, I’ve written thousands of words all about rabbit behaviour and why rabbits do the things that they do, then deleted half and written some more. I’ve also sent it to a proof reader (bunny owner and author Chandra Beal) to have my spelling and grammar beaten into submission. Then corrected all the bits marked with red pen. Brains are funny things; how is it possible to read something over and over and still not notice you’ve written about rabbit’s odd hobbits instead of habits?

The front cover design is sorted, it just needs the barcode and the blurb filled in on the back:

What do you think?

I’ve carried out user testing, by roping in some bunny owners to act as guinea pigs, including the awesome Diana Moll from QI Papers, whose comments were a big help. I also asked Scamp to give it the once over and sign off.

It say's in here that you have to accommodate my behavioural need to chew ... so why do you keep complaining when I eat the cupboard?

Do you think I could charge a premium for copies autographed *cough* chibbled by Scamp?

Update 1st September 2011 – It’s now available to order!

Click Here to Order your Copy

Understanding Your Rabbit’s Habits
ISBN: 978-09543500-2-4

I wonder how many thousands of bunny owners wake up on a Saturday morning, mow their lawn, throw away or compost the clippings, and then pop into the pet shop and tut over the price of hay, that in some cases has been shipped half way around the world. Now the obvious thing would be just to cut a section of grass (with scissors not a mower) and feed that direct to your bunnies, but that isn’t always practical. Some people don’t like to feed fresh grass to buns with sensitive tums, and it’s handy to have a good pile of hay in the litter tray even if you’re topping up with grass at dinner time too. So the next option is to take the lovely fresh grass and dry it so it turns into hay! So, that’s what I did….

Making Hay Step 1: Find Grass

The first step is to find some grass. If you lovingly mow your lawn weekly, you might want to skip a week to let it grow out a bit. We may have taken that to the extreme as our lawn looked something like this:

Which was the inspiration for making hay in the first place. If you don’t have a lawn, you could try asking your neighbours – offer to ‘cut’ their grass in exchange for keeping the clippings. Just make sure they don’t use any weedkiller/pesticides.

Making Hay Step 2: Cut the Grass

Once you have located your patch of grass, next you need to cut it. It’s important not to use a lawn mower for this. Mowers chop up the grass and crush it which encourages it to begin fermenting. This is great if you want to compost it but no good for feeding to rabbits. If you’re cutting a big patch you could use scythe (don’t chop off any body parts) but I went for scissors; big hedge scissors would be quicker than kitchen ones if you’re cutting a lot. I filling up this A4 paper box in about a minute… it doesn’t take long.

Making Hay Step 3: Drying the Grass

Next is the difficult part, the grass needs to dry out (and turn into hay). There are a few options for this. You could leave the grass where you cut it and turn it a few times to help it dry. The trouble with that is you are at the mercy of the weather. If your grass keeps getting soaked it will turn into a soggy mess instead of hay. It also means your lawn is covered in grass cuttings.

It was raining almost every day when I started so I decided to pop it in my mini greenhouse now the seedlings are mostly outside. It’s important the air gets to it so I made a shelf out of some plastic mesh and left the doors open (a closed greenhouse would get too humid). Note: The foil isn’t part of hay making, it just helps my seedlings grow straight as the greenhouse sits against a wall.

You could also use a covered deck, greenhouse, shed with windows etc. or you could lay it out on a sheet and just pick it up in the sheet when rain is forecast and pop it out afterwards. The top of a wire rabbit run would be great if the weather is a bit drier.

Here is my grass all laid out ready to dry.

Making Hay Step 4: Wait

That’s it for the hard work, now you just need to wait for it to dry. It didn’t take long like this. In two weeks it smelt and looked like tasty hay.

Once it has dried out you can store it like you would normal hay. Something that breaths (like a Hessian bag or pillow case would be best) just in case there is any moisture left. If you leave it out in the sun it will loose the hint of green and go golden brown (still edible but less nutrients).

Making Hay Step 4: Taste Test

The whole point of making hay is producing something tasty for a bunny to eat, so the process wouldn’t be complete without a taste test.

I think it passed!

Conclusion

Okay, so I’m probably not going to make enough hay from our little patch of lawn to supply hay all your around, but it’s a fun experiment and certainly worth the effort if you want to cut down on your expenses, be more environmentally friendly, or just provide an extra treat.

I’ve been wondering recently about rabbit hops. A lot of welfare information talks about enough room to take three or four or half a dozen hops, but just how far is a rabbit’s hop? The answer, I’m sure, depends on the rabbit in question – particularly how big they are and how long their legs are. Just like humans, not everyone covers exactly the same distance with each step. It made me curious about how far Scamp hopped though, and the best way to answer that is to break out a tape measure and find out!

The yellow and blue ‘markers’ are spaced 30cm (1 foot) apart.

That’s just his normal hopping about the place hop and covers about 18″. I’m sure he travels further when he builds up speed but getting a bunny to hop in a straight line on command is hard work. Just watch these out-takes: