At last, some sunny days! I’ve been clearing up in the garden cutting things back and pulling out weeds (why are they always the first thing up) and sowing loads of seeds. Another thing I’ve been doing is harvesting a supply of chew sticks for Scamp to eat in the hope that a ready supply of sticks to chew will mean less chewing of other things like walls, doors, and skirting boards. Not that it will stop him, but just think how much more he’d chew if he didn’t have sticks too.

Chew sticks are a bit expensive to buy and, according to Scamp, just not as tasty as the fresh stuff so growing your own is a great way to keep a ready supply. Don’t these look good enough to eat?

Home grown apple, grape and raspberry chew sticks

These are…

• Apple – Apple trees come in different sizes, unless you’ve got a giant garden go for a dwarf tree that will stay about 6′ (with pruning), you can even grow apple trees in big containers but that will limit their grow quite a bit so don’t expect as many twigs to cut. The down side is it will probably take a year or two for your tree to get established and produce more than a handful of twigs. Apple trees are quite common and easy for non green-fingered folks to identify so if you don’t have space for a tree yourself, ask around – I bet someone you know has one.
• Grape – These grow like crazy which means loads of sticks, you can grow them in a pot against a wall, fence or over an arch. I cut them fresh when they start poking at people walking fast and there is still plenty left to turn woody in autumn.
• Raspberry – I love raspberries! So I get the fruit and Scamp gets the leaves during summer and the sticks in spring. I picked a thornless variety so in late winter/spring, I just cut the whole lot to the ground which gives me three or four 4′ long sticks per plant. That’s from raspberries grown in a tub – you’d get even more if you’ve room to give them space in the ground. More on raspberries here.

Our hazel is almost big enough we might be able to prune it next winter and have another flavour of chew stick – I think you have to dry hazel first?

What to do with Chew Sticks

I noticed that chew sticks can be a bit hit and miss with bunnies. A stick on the floor is often considered just part of the landscape and given about as much attention as a human would give a twig on a woodland walk. Partly, I think, because shop brought chew sticks are old dry wood and therefore less tasty and partly because a stick on the floor is just part of the décor.

So, I decided to have a little fun. Introducing the stick monster:

Here are the steps to make your own…

1. Gather a selection of edible sticks and have them approved by a handsome assistant.

1b. Remove sticks from handsome assistants mouth

2. Jab a kitchen roll tube with a handy pair of scissors, whilst being careful to avoid rabbit trying to jump on your lap.

3. Post sticks through holes. Some sticks I pushed through one hole and out another, others just in one hole and I garnished the top with a few spares.

Then hand to bunny for testing…

I think this would work great hung up or even part wedged in a tunnel so a bun can chew through “roots” (encouraging natural behaviour). Scamp’s is presently wedged by the cupboard he’s got him eye on extending into.

This week I’ve been sorting through my seeds and working out what I should be planting when and how I’m going to fit it all in. I know mixing gardens and bunnies can be a bit tricky, so I thought I would share a few ideas for what to grow. I’m starting with flowers; here are my favourite  annual flowers (plants you have to resow each year) that you can start in the next few months. They are all rabbit safe (should your bun accidentally nibble) and look pretty!

Nasturtiums

# Photo by Andy Wright

These are brilliant, lovely big flowers in bright yellows, peach, oranges and reds and big bright green leaves to set them off.  The seeds are big (size of a small pea) so they are easy to sow and great for children to have a go with. They are also easy to grow, you can start them in pots or straight in the ground. If you let the seed pods ripen and collect them when the go brown you’ll have free seeds for next year too!

They come in two types, bushes which funnily enough are bush shaped, and climbers which will ramble 6-8′ along the ground or up a fence, bamboo cane or rabbit run. The whole plant is rabbit (and human) safe, leaves, flowers and seed pods. The trouble with being so tasty is it has a tendency to be popular with caterpillars and little black flies but you can pinch off the leaves or just let the caterpillars do their thing and the plants will have another flush of leaves once they turn into butterflies. Mine flower from summer right up until the first frost.

Pansy/Viola

# photo by aidswarrio

Pansy flowers are a similar shape to nasturtiums but they come in an even bigger range of colours, from white to pink, red, blue, purple, yellow, orange etc. The plants themselves are smaller and more compact so they are great for hanging baskets or window boxes.  Pansy’s are a little more tricky to grow from seed but they are very commonly available as plug plants so you can cheat and just plant them out. You can also get ‘winter pansy’s’ in autumn which, in the UK at least, will flower through winter in a sheltered spot.

Pot Marigold (Calendula officinalis)

# photo by Brian Ballard

There are two types of marigold – Pot/English Marigolds (Calendula officinalis)  and French/African Marigolds (Tagetes). It’s the Pot Marigolds that are rabbit safe. They are big orange and yellow flowers – often sold as cut flowers, so good if you want something to pop in a vase inside that you don’t need to panic over when Scamp jumps the table, hops across a book shelf and sniffs the flowers with his teeth. Not that he would ever do that!

They are easy to grow, and again, the seeds are quite big and easy to save from year to year. They seem to self seed well too – I can see some young plants that germinated last autumn and hung around the winter – they’ll probably be some of the first flowers open when the weather warms up and I’ll sow more to flower a bit later so we get them through to autumn. They grow from about 6″ to 2′ depending on the variety so read the seed packet to make sure they’ll fit the space you have.

Peas

# photo by themediatedgarden

Peas? Yes, I know the are a vegetable and I’ll cover those in a different post, but vegetables are plants too, we just happen to eat parts of them. Sweet peas are very pretty but they are also poisonous, so if you want pretty climbing flowers, that are completely rabbit safe, the edible kind is a better option. Most standard varieties of peas have white flowers… still quite pretty but for a real splash of colour try a mangetout (snow/sugarsnap pea) variety called Carouby de Maussane – 6′ tall with beautiful purple flowers. They aren’t the most common variety so you might have to pick them up online rather than a local shop. The whole plant is rabbit edible, sow extras and you can thin them out by eating the growing shoots or leave them to grow on for tasty pods (the pods are better for rabbits than actual peas so pick them before they start to swell up).

Sunflower

# photo Michal Zacharzewski

I love sunflowers! My efforts to grow giant ones seem to top out at a puney 7′ but I have fun trying each year. Everyone knows what a sunflower looks like right? Tall stalk, big yellow flower up top and big green leaves like steps all the way up. There is actually a bit more variation that that, I grew some with chocolate coloured flowers last year, and they also come in white, oranges, red, and even a deep reddish purple – some have multiple flowers per stalk. They come in different sizes too, from 20′ giants, to dwarf ones that are only a foot tall. Again sunflowers have big seeds, that you can collect and sow (or eat) the next year, and they are easy to grow.

Anyone got any other favourite rabbit safe flowers to recommend?

Ps. Apparently I take quite a lot of rabbit photos and not so many flower photos so these are stock images, as obviously there are no flowers out to take pics of until later in the year when it’s too late to start sowing. So thank you to those that do take pics and give permission to share them.

Small Furry Pets magazine interviewed me this month about my work with Rabbit Rehome (a website promoting rabbit adoption). One of the questions they asked me was whether certain breeds of rabbits were more popular and therefore quicker to rehome.  It’s hard to pick the most popular rabbits, there are such a big varieties that end up in rescue centres, but it’s very easy to pick out the least popular. Ask any rescue and they’ll tell you the the very hardest rabbits to rehome are brown with upright ears (black rabbits and white rabbits with red eyes follow close behind). It seems a shame that somewhere along the line rabbits in their natural form have become those that are seen as the least beautiful.

So today, I’m going to tell you, with Scamp’s help, why brown is the prettiest colour of them all.

Now when I say brown, it’s a bit of a fib, in fact if you look really closely at a wild bunny you can find most of the colours that make up range we see in domestic rabbits. For example, the soft orange fur on the back of the neck:

And a ticklable white fluffy belly:

Even the bits that look brown, aren’t. Bunnies like Scamp are actually ‘agouti’, which means:

Fur in which each hair has alternate dark and light bands, producing a grizzled appearance.

I think we’ll ignore ‘grizzled’ (grizzled? obviously someone hasn’t seen a beautiful brown bunny). If you blow into the fur of an agouti bunny this is what you see:

Each hair is a mix of grey, chocolate, cream and black.

The best thing about brown bunnies is they are the most creative moulters, the layers of colour means that as new fur grows through you get amazing (and occassionally embarrassing) patterns. This is what Scamp looks like at the moment:

The dark areas are where the old fur has moulted out, and the black tips of the new fur are coming through. It’s like trying to make pictures out of clouds, you never know what shapes he’ll grow day to day, sometimes he has a Nike tick on his forehead, sometimes a saddle, looks a bit like a giraffe at the moment!

February is Adopt a Rabbit month in the US, and if you are thinking about adopting a bunny, please have a look at those that are perhaps not quite so flashy but may have the best characters,  or be little terrors like Scamp.

Scamp sitting on a grass mat, just outside his warren entrance (cardboard tunnel).

This is Scamp’s Christmas present, he really likes it! How can I tell? Not because three weeks post Christmas it’s still in one piece (usually the opposite is true for rabbits – the more they like it the quicker it is shredded). I know because he has shifted his napping spot 9″ to the left so that he can sit on the mat whilst napping. Rabbit’s really like routine, so I know he really likes his mat because he’s changed his habits to use it. In case you think I’m a bit mean, I haven’t moved the mat 9″ to the right as that would be under the sink, and I don’t think natural fibre mats appreciate having water dripped on them.

It’s a big responsibility being a pet owner, he had no way of saying: “Hey, I really wish I had something just about here to sit on’. We have to try and anticipate our rabbit’s wants and needs. Any else found something their your bunny really likes that maybe isn’t one of the basics (food/water/litter tray etc.)?

Want to see a cute, mat related video….

Happy new year – I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays.

If I wrote new years resolutions, they’d basically be ‘get on with the stuff on your to do list’, but that’s boring and mostly not at all rabbit related, so I thought I’d help everyone else with theirs instead. Here are my five resolutions for rabbit owners. Hopefully you’ll be able to tick off a few of them straight away.

1. Make 2012 the year your rabbit eats hay

There is pretty much nothing as important to a rabbit’s health as eating hay, and yet a worrying number of rabbits don’t get it or don’t like it. It can feel like trying to persuade a child to eat sprouts but don’t give up, give it another try an see if you can get your rabbit eating even if it’s just a little each day.

Here’s some help:

• 5 Ways to Get your Rabbit to Eat More Hay
• Rabbits Eat Grass
• Making Your Own Hay

2. Find an emergency vet and write the number down

It’s 1am on a bank holiday, your bunny has stopped eating and is looking miserable, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! Nope, you need an emergency vet. Do you have a number to hand? If not, go find it now and write it somewhere you won’t forget.

In recent years many vets have swapped from having a vet on call to using a dedicated out of hours service which might not be at your normal practice, so not only do you need a number, you need an address too. It’s also a good idea to think about how you would get there, if you usually get a lift from a friend or use public transport – will that option always be available? If not how about adding an envelope with enough cash to cover a taxi to your pinboard next to the number.

One final thing, once you get there, the vet is going to want paying, if you don’t already, think about putting a little away each week to cover unexpected vet bills, or get some insurance quotes.

3. Keep your rabbit busy

We don’t just want healthy rabbits, we want happy rabbits! Be inspired by the RSPCA Happy Bunnies and make sure your rabbit has plenty of fun things to do. See if you can think up a new toy or activity every week – you can rotate toys so you don’t have to come up with limitless ideas. Here are some to get you started:

• Cardboard Tube Toys, and more, and more
• Making a Paper Tunnel
• Yellow Pages

4. Learn something new

Rabbit’s are complicated little fluff balls and knowledge about how to best care for them in continually being updated, see if you can find something new to learn this year whether it’s watching a webinar, reading a book, chatting with your vet or checking out the latest articles on websites like House Rabbit Society or Rabbit Welfare Association.

If you’d like to read a book, I have one on rabbit behaviour your might find interesting: Understanding Your Rabbit’s Habits (or Amazon US /UK) 😉

5. Spread your knowledge

If you are reading this I guarantee you know at least one or two things about rabbits that someone else doesn’t. So tell them. It doesn’t even have to be someone with rabbits. Mention you just dropped £250 on your rabbits vet bill to a colleague and perhaps when their friend’s nephew demands a bunny, they’ll remember an mention how much they cost. Or you could be a bit more blatant and pop up some posters or strike up conversation with someone next time your in a pet shop about how pellets are so much healthier than mix. It’s an easy way to help contribute to improve welfare for all rabbits.

So there you go, I hope that helped with your new year planning. Before you go, while we’re talking about planning, I was wondering if there is anything you’d like me to write more about? More pics of Scamp getting into trouble, activities to do with your bunny, growing things, or do you like the science stuff – should I put poop under the microscope? What would you like to read about?