The Hebivore Feeding Project Part 2: It's sprouting!
So, here are the pictures of our herbivore feeding table that was described in the previous post (bonus points if you can spot the tortoise and the dog in these pictures).
As you can see, we have some tiny baby greens! It’s all very exciting but as of yet, we have not accomplished any of our three goals: feed our herbivores, save money, and be more earth friendly.
I have high hopes that these tiny sprouts will eventually feed the lettuce eaters of our house, but if we set the buns loose on them now, I’m afraid they wouldn’t even make an afternoon snack. As for saving money, obviously that is not happening yet because we are not feeding the home grown greens. And finally, the earth friendly aspect... We discovered the first possible flaw in our plan here. We mixed too much peat moss in with our compost and soil, so the bed is a little too efficient at retaining water, and thus does not drip down to water the lawn below. Even though this was not the intended result, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. We have to water the lettuce bed less often than expected, but we still have to water the lawn. Also, because the bed retains so much water, it can get quite heavy, so we have to plan its rotation more carefully then expected.
I’ll post our materials list and plans soon, I just wanted to make any necessary adjustments based on our experiences before I unleash the official version upon the world.
The Hebivore Feeding Project
We currently share our home with three herbivores: Peter- an 8 year old black and white rabbit, Flopsy- a young lop eared bunny that we recently rescued, and Sherman- a 70+ lb. Sulcata Tortoise (also a rescue). We also plan on adding chickens to the menagerie soon, but more on that later...
Peter
Flopsy
Sherman
Sherman’s only food source is our lawn, so in the dry California summers we have to water it, which is not very earth friendly and can be expensive. The rabbits eat only fresh organic greens, which is earth friendly, but also expensive. The drought this year has finally given us the motivation to come up with a new system.
We are planning to build several very shallow vegetable beds on long 30” legs. The beds will only be about 2”-3” deep, because we plan to grow mixed greens with very shallow root systems for the rabbits. The beds will be on the long legs for two reasons: One, we want Sherman to be able to walk under the beds instead of plowing over the top of them, and two (this is the earth friendly part), we are making the bottom of the beds out of mesh screen. As we water the greens, any excess water will drip down onto the lawn below, watering that as well. We also plan to put wheels on two of the bed’s legs, like a wheelbarrow, so that we can move it around to different areas of the yard throughout the summer.
We’ll post our plans, pictures of the project as it comes along, and let you know if this system actually meets all of our goals.
View the next posts in this series: