timothy hay vs orchard grass

[xnovalentine]

I’ve been having trouble getting lulla to eat a good amount of hay so i thought mixing together some other types of hay with the timothy hay would help encourage her to eat more. Well it did, but she is picking out just the orchard grass and leaving the timothy hay. I’ve stopped giving her the orchard grass and shes got that rabbitude where its like … well if your not giving me what i want then im not going to eat anything.

so my question is : is it okay for her to just mainly have orchard grass? i mean – i want her to eat something but nothing won’t do any good either. any thoughts?

[Sarita]

Absolutely Orchard Grass only is absolutely okay – it is a grass hay just like the Timothy hay so it’s perfectly fine. The only thing with Orchard Grass though is that it may be more seasonal than Timothy Hay but I’m not entirely sure of that, hopefully some other forum members will know if that is the case.

[BB Administrator]

I can tell you right now, at least for me, Orchard is more green right now than the Timothy –
BinkyBunny here – just in admin mode.

Helloworld!!

[osprey]

My guys won’t touch timothy either, they get orchard grass and oat hay exclusively.

 

[Gravehearted]

i buy different types of grass hay just to keep my bunnies interested and from getting bored of the same old thing. Timothy, oat, bunny brome, orchard grass are all ok to free feed. I know we can get orchard grass here year round, but am not sure if that’s the case everywhere.

[poopy]

Osprey, do yours prefer either orchard or oat hay? Medusa LOVES oat hay, but for variety I thought I would get Orchard for her next bale. It is 120lbs though so that is a big committment. I’m not sure if she will like it as much. Does the orchard have lots of seed heads? That’s the part she loves in oat hay

[osprey]

Yeah, the bale is a big commitment.  Any way you can get a flake?  Maybe from a horse barn nearby or something?  Maybe even asking your hay merchant for a bag of test hay?  I know mine often has busted bales that I can take from if I want to.

Mine get the orchard grass as their every day, maintenance hay.  The stuff I have been getting lately has few if any seed heads, possibly because it is second cut.  The hay itself tends to be longer and leafier than timothy, with few if any stems.  The timothy that I have gotten around here is very stemmy, and the buns don’t like it much.  I use the oat hay as a treat hay; I give them a handful at bedtime as a bribe to get them back in the pen.  They munch up the seed heads right away, and for the most part leave the stems behind.  They chew on the stems from time to time, but don’t eat them all.  Over the summer I got a bale of wonderful green oat hay, which was kind of like a leafy green timothy hay with oat seed heads.  They ate this like crazy, stems, leaves, everything.  That was probably a second cutting so the leaves and stems were more tender.

 

[poopy]

Approximately how big is a flake?

[osprey]

A flake is something like 5-8 pounds of hay?  Not exactly sure.  The way it works is hay is basically cut grass that is dried, compressed and then wrapped in rope to make a bale.  The machine that produces the bales works by compressing the hay into 2" to 3" bands, which are then pressed together to make the big bale.  When you break open the bale, these bands come out pretty much intact, and each band is called a "flake". The bales I get around here are on the order of 100 pounds or so, and contain 12-14 flakes.

[Author]

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