Just add water…

Grass!

…and a little time, like a week. The greenery is popping out all over the place. The grass is three or four inches (75 to 100 mm) high in many places, but the real treat for horses is what we call filaree, a forb that they love. They discovered the filaree when it was barely out of its seed form (mm-m-m! filaree sprouts!) and have continued munching it wherever they can find it, which is almost everywhere.

Filaree!

As a testament to filaree’s appeal, we put out six drums of Crystalyx, a hardened molasses-and-protein-and-other-stuff mix, in various places around the ranch. Each drum weighs about 250 pounds (113 kg) and the horses found them quickly. Being hierarchical (kind of like chickens) the meanest horses get to eat first, then the second-third-and-fourth meanest horses, and finally the wimps get in a lick or two before the meanest ones get hungry again. Usually the Crystalyx is gone after a couple of weeks, but we found three drums with some of it still uneaten, and no horses around! All we need now is more rain in order to keep the green stuff growing.

Or we’ll have to spend the other green stuff on more Crystalyx. Or feed hay. Or move onto a more rewarding way to make a living, like raising worms or chinchillas.

Green=warm. Red=cold. Weird.

Our horses subsist on geraniums. Or at least a close relative, locally known as filaree. It’s also known as storksbill or heron’s bill. The botanical name is Erodium. They produce spiral/helical stickers in abundance in the springtime. When these stickers lodge in your socks, they’re referred to less in Latin terms and more in the Anglo-Saxon, if you catch my drift. After the first few autumn rains, those nasty seeds sprout (good riddance!) and we get plants with the leaves that horses love to eat.


A curious thing happens when the cold days of winter arrive; some of the leaves turn from deep green to bright red. Another curious thing happens; the filaree that grows under trees, as shown in the picture above, stays bright green. The trees are keeping the ground under them warm enough to stop the reddening that occurs when the leaves are unprotected.

It doesn’t seem that the shade of a tree almost barren of leaves could make that much difference in ground temperature, but the pictures shown here should prove that it does. Green or red, the horses chomp away, so we’re not worried. Now if only they would eat those nasty stickers! But they’d starve, so…

…never mind. Besides, horses don’t wear socks, so they couldn’t care less.