Experimenting with Fodder I

05/29/2014

Mary
Mary
Quiet Contrary
How Does Your Fodder Grow? 

My names not Mary but for my first experiment in growing fodder I had a success and a failure. I found the concept of "fodder" quiet accidentally, I was looking up feeding rabbits naturally to see what opinions were on the subject. I found fodder.

I don't know which website first introduced me to fodder, but instantly I was hooked on the idea. Just think a system that takes just a week to grow and can increase your food up to 6x by weight! The possibilities! Fodder can be fed to rabbits, goats, horses, cattle, chickens, just about anything that will eat greens! In researching the subject I saw lots of farmers considering doing fodder on a larger scale as a viable way to supplement feed and save hundreds of dollars of feed costs.

Here are the websites I bookmarked to refer back to:
http://www.dogislandfarm.com/2013/03/what-fodder.html
http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/growing-sprouted-fodder/72618
http://rabbittalk.com/fodder-sprouting-systems-anyone-t10317-30.html
http://www.thehappiesthorse.com/2013/01/22/grain-fodder-for-your-horses/

I am IN LOVE with the dog island farms blog post "What the Fodder"! I also borrowed the picture above from peakprosperity!

I love nature, but it doesn't love me... you see I have a brown thumb. Since I have trouble keeping plants alive and having them grow I didn't want to "invest" much into a fodder system that I was afraid wouldn't work for me. Growing Fodder is Simple, you need: seeds, water, and a container. It is better if the container has drainage but you can use any old container. 

I didn't want to invest in a large bag of seed in case the experiment didn't work so I went over to my local whole foods and got barley and a winter wheat seed. For my containers I went to my local family dollar and got plastic shoe boxes ($1 each with a lid). I used a shoe box and a plastic salad container =)

Since everything I had read indicated it was best to let the seeds germinate in a dark space I put them on used cupboard space and let them grow. 

The barley (which I had read was the best seed to use) didn't grow. The wheat seeds grew but the top was yellow... 

After minutes on the counter that yellow turned to green! 

Today I decided it had grown enough and gave hunks to my rabbits, and left some outside to see if it could successfully transplant and grow (having been unable to find an answer online). The rabbits are picking at it, but not going to town... I guess I jumped the gun buying a HUGE bag of seed!