58. Botanical update

Ragweed — yum?

Oak leaves — just fine?

As summer starts to edge towared autumn, Gus’s browsing preferences seem to be changing a bit with the season.  Whereas clover never gave him a thrill in spring, now that it’s blossoming it’s a huge favorite, worth strolling around in search of.  The bedstraw is acceptable, but not the special treat it seemed to be when it was young.  To my surprise, the carrot-cousin Queen Anne’s lace is still shunned; same for chicory and burdock and ragweed — until suddenly today he yanks up a big, multistalked, green-flowering ragweed plant and systematically chews and swallows the whole thing.  Wha-a-a-a??

Gus’s first choice is always grasses, especially if the blades are long and wide and rank, as they are under the fences where the mower spares them, and in the fenny and thickety areas where they’re overfertilized by proximity to old manure piles.  He also enjoys the mower-spewed cuttings when they lie on top of the recently cut lawns.  This fodder, though, is neither fresh like live plants nor cured like hay, so I worry that it could be mouldy or fermenting or otherwise unhealthy.  But this is the animal who blithely eats oak leaves with no apparent ill effects, so I guess he can digeset old grass clippings too.

46. More donkey botany

For some reason, Gus is being almost polite when I bring him away from grazing.  I’d like to think he’s internalizing the new reality of his inescapable lead rope and accepting that resistance is futile.  But when he gave me some protracted hell about walking out to his paddock one recent rainy day (“I don’t do mud puddles”), I was disabused: clearly lead-line misbehavior remains his go-to form of protest.  More likely, it’s simply time that’s changed his grazing manners.  The grass is no longer so spring-fresh and intoxicatingly succulent after a barren winter.  Also I’m scheduling his grazing sessions to last 30 minutes or more and then to conclude right when Sandy is delivering evening grain.  Few things trump the chance to graze, but grain is one of them.  Gus hardly balks as I lift his head from the greensward, and he readily abandons the pasture to go to his stall when his feed bucket awaits.

Nevertheless, he’s still thoroughly committed to ingesting as much pasture as possible.  More summer wildflowers (that is, weeds) are appearing now, and I’m whiling away his hours of grazing by noting every plant he eats or shuns.  He’ll eat ground ivy, also known as gill-over-the-ground, but he steers clear of bindweed, a kind of wild morning-glory.  He eats a tall chickweed and even the fuzzy leaves, stems, and blossoms of a white-flowering campion.  He enjoys tickseed trefoil — no wonder, since it’s a legume, like alfalfa and clover.  Among humans, lamb’s quarters are favored fodder for the tree-hugging set, and violets for the more lah-di-dah set, but Gus skips both plants.  Same for betony and burdock; the low-growing, lacy-leaved pineapple weed; random potentillas, or cinquefoils; and a wild prunella known as heal-all.  But his priorities are unmistakable:  even the weeds he most enjoys, such as plantain and bedstraw, ain’t a patch on a patch of grass.  Gus, the purist in spite of himself.

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.