# Food plots, persimmons, pecans, multiflora roses, old honeysuckle vine



## DonnaBelle (Dec 16, 2012)

As my subject line hints, this is a post about other things my goats eat besides their small amount of grain and hay.

Oops, hit the wrong button, got to edit this, LOL

Anyway, my goats had a great fall eating deadfall from a huge pear tree accross the road from our ranch.  The neighbor kindly allow me to pick up dead fall pears and feed them to my goats.   As you can imagine, they loved them.  That was October.

 In September DH also planted about 4 acres in austrian winter peas and tall rye grass for them to have great winter pasture but alas, only about l/2 an inch of rain since then, so it's all sprouted but not grown much.  So, unless we get some rain soon, no winter pasture for my goats.

BUT, a huge crop of persimmons from two large persimmons in the goat pasture, we knock them down with a fishing pole every day for about a month, and the goats are now persimmon tree trained.

There are two large pecan trees in the boy's pasture and they have been eating pecans for the past 3 weeks..

We also have a lot of multiflora roses growing in the fence lines on our ranch, and in winter the goats methodically go down all the fence lines and eat the rose hips and leaves.

And of course, last but not least, good ole aged honeysuckle vine, they love them too.  Lots of that in the wooded areas of the ranch.  We took them on a long walk yesterday and they had a lovely brouse of roses and honeysuckle.

I bought a couple of packages of mangle seeds online and I'm going to plant them in a small plot in the back yard this spring.  My goats DO NOT have access to the back yard, so when the mangles mature, I'll just chop them up (or sweet talk DH into doing it for me with his ax and feed them as a small treat)

Just a few things my goaties like to eat, FYI....

DonnaBelle


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## Oakroot (Dec 16, 2012)

Thank you for sharing this. We are looking to pasture raise our goats as much as possible in the future. Right now they are all on hay and grain since our land is nothing but lawn but I have been looking for ideas of things to plant for them.


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## Ranchhandok (Mar 25, 2013)

Nice list of "things to eat". I feel better that your goats eat pecans. We put some hulls in our garden and I have had noses under the fence nibbling. I was worried now not so much.


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## goatboy1973 (Apr 1, 2013)

Sounds like Oklahoma has the same species of browse as Tennessee. I have a small grove of persimmons growing in our nursery/ weaning lot. The momma goats will stand under the persimmon trees and wait for some to fall. In Tennessee we have more honeysuckle and multiflora than anything else growing wild along with wild blackberries. Our goats love all these and in the summer these make up a great deal of their dietary intake along with poison ivy. I wish all these wild food sources could be baled up like hay or haylage and used to feed goats in stockpiles.


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## Fluffygal (Apr 7, 2013)

Our place is wooded in the back with lots for the girls to forage right now. Lots of wild blackberry bushes, poisen ivy, oak saplings, some other wild scrubby plants that I have no idea what they are, lots of weeds, pine, they ate hazel nuts when the trees dropped those, honey suckle, and pretty much anything growing back there has been tasted. 
They do not care for the phylidondra plant that is huge which is good because the chickens use that tropical beauty to hide under, for shade, and nursery when they have chicks. 

I know they love roses as when the stinkers got into the front they cleaned the roses up good for us. Since then the back has been fenced and gated to where they cannot get to the front. I have a garden in the back that is fenced that they would love to get into but cant. I can see them watching when I go in to water just waiting for me to make an oops so they can get in.


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