mint

[bumpybunny]

hi! just wanted to ask how much and how often rabbits can be fed mint? are the stems safe too?

[Bam]

The stems are safe. I dont think there’s a limit to peppermint and spear mint. There are types of mint like penny royal that shouldnt be fed to rabbits.

Mint is often beneficial for buns that have stomach issues. If you have lots of mint, you could feed some fresh and dry the surplus and use as a treat or a hay topper during the cold season. I grow mint myself and I always keep a jar of dried mint for when the bun has an upset tummy. Mint dries just fine if you hang it up indoors in small bunches.

 

 

[LBJ10]

Yes, regular mint varieties are just fine to feed. Bunnies seem to like the “fragrant” herbs. And as Bam said, they are great for drying to have year round too.

[BZOO]

Oohh, what if we don’t know what type of mint it is?

We have “free range mint”, it was here when we moved in, we encourage it for the bees, who LOVE it.  For all I know, it’s catnip.

Would this be ok for buns and gpigs?

[LBJ10]

Both can be aggressive and spread, but pennyroyal has much smaller leaves than peppermint. Are you sure it’s not creeping charlie? That is much more common in lawns than pennyroyal. At least it is in the midwest.

[Bam]

Pennyroyal has its sets of flowers in small “puffs” along the stems, like in this picture.

Peppermint and spearmint have longer sets of flowers, mainly located at the tip of the stems. They also have longer leaves and the whole plant grows  higher than pennyroyal.

I often use the free app Plantnet for plant identification. Its not fool proof, you have to use it with discernment and its often good to take more pics than one of different aspects of the plant and see if you get a consistent search result.

I just took a poor pic of a plant I know is spearmint: It came back as spearmint, but only 41%, probably because the quality of the pic wasnt very good:

 

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