Here in the Central Valley of California, this is a great time for harvesting wild food for the tortoises. This morning I took my plastic bucket and scissors and went around the yard picking and choosing. I came in with an almost full bucket of tortoise food:
I rinse it all off in cold water.
Clockwise, starting with the grass - grass, hollyhock leaves, sow thistle, greens from the garden, filaree, mallow, prickly lettuce, and something else edible I can't think of the name of.
I cut the grass with the scissors:
but everything else gets chopped up with a knife. I sometimes add cactus, but this a.m. I added okra:
Because most of today's offering is wild from the weed bed, I grated cucumber over it:
and mixed it all together. Because grocery store greens are "sweeter" than wild plants, it is sometimes hard to get a baby that has been used to eating grocery store greens, to eat wild plants. The cucumber adds a smell and taste that makes the babies want to eat.
I feed this same mixture to all my babies (leopards, desert tortoises, Texas tortoises, Manouria, Yellowfooted and box turtle. They all eat it, even the baby box turtle. For the last three listed, I add some chopped up fruit or night crawlers (or crickets, etc) to the mixture.
I rinse it all off in cold water.
Clockwise, starting with the grass - grass, hollyhock leaves, sow thistle, greens from the garden, filaree, mallow, prickly lettuce, and something else edible I can't think of the name of.
I cut the grass with the scissors:
but everything else gets chopped up with a knife. I sometimes add cactus, but this a.m. I added okra:
Because most of today's offering is wild from the weed bed, I grated cucumber over it:
and mixed it all together. Because grocery store greens are "sweeter" than wild plants, it is sometimes hard to get a baby that has been used to eating grocery store greens, to eat wild plants. The cucumber adds a smell and taste that makes the babies want to eat.
I feed this same mixture to all my babies (leopards, desert tortoises, Texas tortoises, Manouria, Yellowfooted and box turtle. They all eat it, even the baby box turtle. For the last three listed, I add some chopped up fruit or night crawlers (or crickets, etc) to the mixture.