Aj Jeffers

To the fellow who knows the lady who raises peach trees in a swamp - how does she plant them? Said she mounds stuff up - how high above the water table (or above the high water mark)? I'm in 5b, next to a swamp with some old 60' pines dying out due to a bridge that was relocated for an adjacent springfed creek, and the water table rose a bit in this little patch and they did not like that. Other more suited trees are coming up due to the increased daylight but I thought I'd take advantage and plant a few trees I'd like there before the tamarack and spruce take over entirely. A few fruit trees (not peaches but something) might be nice. Lots of dead matter to pile up, more daylight than twenty years ago. Very treacherous ground, 2' above the water in one spot, 2' below in the next, but could plant them toward the edge and put some planks down to access.

oh and yeah they do get at least four or five varieties of forage every time so they can choose what they're craving, and they don't get it until midday or so so they've eaten their pellets and hay first and aren't starving, and also so the dew's dried. But the snail stuff would have dried too, won't have seen it.

Fungal might very well be it, I live in SW Ontario on top of a cold spring fed swamp / pond / meadows and some hilly glacial till, frogs abound. We have a spring wet season (aside from the snowmelt) and a fall wet season - though it was , as everywhere, a weird year and we had the super long spring, then weeks of dry (very unusual here) and then a week of hard rain, repeat.

Miiiight be the hay, couldn't say. It smells dry, looks dry, orchard hay, but no pesticides / fungicides were used. I only buy a few bales at a time and it sits in a neighbour's barn all winter. Could be something on that that didn't take until later on.

Yes to necropsy - some liver damage but not much, about what I expect for ground dwelling rabbits, I muck out their colony regularly and they have a big old run but there's only so much you can do - life is trade-offs. Some of it was bloat which I hadn't had before really since my first days years ago, and this is why I thought it was something I fed them.

Thanks for the tips on worming. I haven't been worming them but some of what you mentioned is already growing here and I can see if ivermectin is available anywhere.

If it's fungal.. I could harvest during the dry season in July / early August and put it up to hang in the garage, feed that during the fall wet season rather than pulling from the ground as I go. Too late for that this year but certainly next. Some of it I don't positively know what it is until it flowers in September, like the asters, but might be they just don't get asters even if they *do* love them. Unless it's a dry fall.

Sidenote: phragmites australis, that invasive reed along the roadsides. A patch has popped up next to the pond, though it doesn't seem to want to take it over (I think the water is too cold, there's no swimming in it any time of year). I saw a study of people feeding that on the other side of the planet, and I think I saw one mention of it somewhere on this site - want to bring that option up again and see if anyone's been doing it? I'd be happy to donate some sweat to a conservation authority in exchange for taking it all home (sans seed heads) and drying it for winter forage.

Yep - hence the post. The plants I feed are positively identified. Like most patrons of this website I nerd out on that sort of thing.

Question about foraging for rabbits. I fed my colony and tractored rabbits all spring and summer on a small amount of pellets, all the hay they wanted, and once a day I'd bring them an armful of forage. Fat happy fast growing rabbits. In previous years, I did pellets and hay alone, got happy rabbits but this year they seemed happier. Towards the end of summer I had trouble with some of the younger ones dying, both tractor and colony, at the same time, but not the caged rabbits, who I don't bring forage to. I thought I must have fed them something they shouldn't have done, but i hadn't changed anything, the same handful of species I'd been feeding all summer (goldenrod, ragweed, knapweed, thistle, nettle, dandelion, aster, bishopsweed). The only thing that had changed was the weather - also a new bag of food but same food, same supplier, no funny smells or difference in colour or consistency from the old.

It's the first year I've fed primarily forage and the first year I had a tractor. Wondering if the change in season meant a change in the plants I was feeding - I read somewhere that some of them can have more oxylates as fall comes on, maybe the balance got thrown off. So I've got two questions:

1.) Does anyone have a great site for this, i.e. don't feed X plant at Y time because of Z reason?

2.) I had left a meadow with some of the plants I'd been feeding wth the intention of pulling them in Oct / Nov / Dec before snow gets too deep. Considering the potential change in content, should I have harvested them in July or August and dried them, rather than leave them standing to harvest as needed?