45. Botanical notes

I eat a big green salad every day.  I love, severally and individually, each item I might toss in as happenstance and the season allow.  Romaine, leaf, and head lettuces each taste of a slightly different shade of green (even when they’re red); vidalia onion is sweet and pungent; pea shoots or sunflower sprouts bring a faint whiff of good, clean dirt; red bell pepper tastes as day-glo bright as it looks; and extras — say, kalamata olives and heirloom tomatoes, or sugarsnap pea pods and chunks of apple — just make the party merrier.  No wonder I get vicarious satisfaction from Gus’s gourmet grazing.

Clockwise from top-left: bedstraw, plantain,
buttercup, chicory, clover, fescue

His multi-acre larder is now featuring a nice mix of sprouting, blooming, and fruiting plants, which his nimble lips seek avidly, take as they come, or occasionally reject.  I’ve watched him, for example, insist on cropping the bedstraw that grows under the fence rails where the mower can’t reach.  Its flower clusters, leaves, and sticky stems seem equally delicious.  Rye, fescue, blue, crab — all grasses are welcome.  Clovers large and small are fine but don’t seem a particular delicacy.  Ditto for dandelions (entirely edible even when the seedheads are fluffy) and for the wilted catkins dropped by nearby trees — they’re like peels or seeds that you don’t relish but you don’t bother to pick out either.  Buttercups are rather toxic to horses, and Gus shares his buddies’ instinctive distaste for them.  He eats around them, although if a certain mouthful does snag a stray buttercup leaf or flower, he doesn’t bother to spit it out.

(And like horses, he’s an expert spitter-outer.  If he accidentally uproots a grass rather than nipping the blade off cleanly, he continues biting fresh grass and chewing what’s in his mouth without missing a beat, but soon the roots get poked out to the side and he scissors them off and lets them drop.  No threshing machine could sort more efficiently.)

I’ve subtly steered Gus toward certain plants just to see what his mouth will think of them.  He avoids chicory and hawkweed, but he likes plantains off all shapes and sizes, blooming or not.  Not surprisingly, he also eats some sort of wild-carrot thing that grows sparsely amidst the turf, so I expect he’ll go for Queen Anne’s lace later this summer.   More botanical adventures to come, for both of us saladheads.