Drying your own weeds

[Ozric Jonathan]

Two years ago I had a glut of the sow-thistle that grows by underground runners. The bloomin' thing was sprouting up over a wide area in my garden. I let it grow and then cut the whole lot down, discarded the stalks and dried it indoors, spread out on newspaper. It took a few days to dry and I shoved it into plastic bags.

Months later I got the bags out. At first my torts thought I was crazy and ignored it. But if I kept putting it in front of them they started to eat it. Either dry, or moistened.

Last week I had a look at the tortoise trust forum which I hadn't looked at for years and lo and behold there are keepers on there who are using electric food dehydrators to dry out weeds for tortoises.

I'm not going to buy any electronic gizmo, but if I get a surplus of something over the next few months I'm going to try a bit of indoor drying again.

I tried to find out if the nutrient make-up of the leaf material is changed by drying it. It seems that a bit of this and that can be lost in the drying process but it's not adding anything in. If anyone else knows about that please do let me know.

[Stellanne]

I really don't know much about the drying process either Jonathan, but what I do know is my torts enjoy crunching away on sun dried weeds in their enclosure.
I wonder if sun dried gives a different product than drying indoors. I was going to say that could be tricky for you being in Scotland, but I know you can have some beautifully hot days up there. X x x xhugs x x x Stella x x

[Ozric Jonathan]

Stella you're right about the weather - well here in the west at least- it is wet.

I found the indoor drying worked well just spreading the leaves out on paper. Just takes longer than drying in the sun.

In California people dry peaches in the sun. Now that definitely wouldn't work here...........

[burnt toast]

Hi Jonathan, fairly sure that I read somewhere dried leafs are higher in protein than the same leaf fresh.

[Ozric Jonathan]

Thanks Lynn.

I've been looking around the internet for information about the effect that drying has on the nutrient content of leaves and it might be different for every plant.

From the articles I've looked at so far, drying is noted to reduce the nutrient content. Faster drying seems to reduce it more than slower drying.

Of course the bulk of material is greatly reduced in drying. So a tortoise might eat the equivalent of a big pile of fresh stuff in a few mouthfuls of dried leaves.

[Ozric Jonathan]

Just to update, I had a reply from Andy Highfield of the Tortoise Trust about this.

The answer is quite complicated. The nutrient content of the leaves varies across the seasons.

The wild tortoises do eat dried up material but if there is no water around for a while they won't eat it. This is because they 'know' eating totally dry stuff when they are not hydrated is a bad idea.

If we're always offering fresh water then we should be fine offering stuff that is dry. This means that if we dry some leaves ourselves we don't have to soak them before feeding.

What goes on with the nutrients when leaves are dried is quite tricky. You could say the nutrients are concentrated because the bulk of leaf material shrinks so much in the drying. But most of our weeds are very low protein to start with.