Good morning everyone,
Long time lurker, first time poster here. I have learned an incredible amount about creating
native habitat and
gardening on this site. Our goal is to be able to grow as much food as possible within our 1/3 acre while simultaneously harvesting/absorbing
water and still maintaining
enough lawn space for our children to play. We just started our third year of heavy mulching, planting native, and creating raised beds and things are going great.
My question today is about creating an ideal lawn for our pet rabbit to graze. We have a large hutch/pen space for her and move it to fresh lawn roughly every 2-4 days. This is one of the ways we are working to build organic matter in the lawn space along with mulching the grass at 3 inches high (highest setting on our lawn mower) and shredding and raking in leaves in fall (not ideal C/N ratio but working with what we have). Lately, I've noticed the fescue and clover are getting heavy competition from invasive species that either our rabbit does not seem to care for or is so invasive it's crowding out everything else: tall flatsedge, crab grass, goose grass, nimblewill, giant foxtail, Japanese stiltgrass, and common sheep sorrel. I'm in the process of hand/tool removing everything I possibly can and would like to overseed in the cooler weather with (mostly) native species that
rabbits prefer to eat.
A mix of warm and cool weather pasture seed would be best as we get fairly hot summers lately. I'm leaning toward fescues, ryegrass, timothy and orchard grasses for cool weather. Any recommendations on warm weather grasses or other plants that can handle grazing and mowing while still looking vaguely lawn-like? Multipurpose species (i.e. pollinator habitat, deep taproots, etc.) would be a huge bonus!
For reference, we live in zone 7a with roughly 42 inches of rainfall annually.
Thank you so much for any help!
Ben
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