mediterranean feederplants

shell-shocked · 09-12-2016, 10:06 AM

hi, i have not been able to find anywhere that lists the best common feeder plants for hermanni in their natural habitat. any ideas? thank you. i'd like to try to cultivate some of them...

sandy · 09-12-2016, 02:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shell-shocked

hi, i have not been able to find anywhere that lists the best common feeder plants for hermanni in their natural habitat. any ideas? thank you. i'd like to try to cultivate some of them...

Mallows grown in the med.
As do dandelions, sowthistles, grape leaves, cacti (large pad ones)
They all grow in my daughters garden in the south of france:0)
I forgot so do hibiscus flowers and leaves.

Jan W · 09-12-2016, 07:57 PM

Great name - shell shocked.

Welcome to the forum.

Ozric Jonathan · 11-12-2016, 01:49 PM

Hi there. A good source of information generally is The Tortoise Table

http://www.thetortoisetable.org.uk/site/plants_19.asp

The Mediterranean region has a huge number of plants compared to the UK and there is a limited knowledge about what wild tortoises eat. There have been various studies but what seems to happen is that the tortoise eats a high proportion of the plants that grow in that area but this differs greatly between various areas.

Tortoises eat many of the plants in the group Asteracae. There are many thousands of species.

They eat sedums and there are a quite a few of those that are suitable to grow in the garden. Sedum Album and sedum rupestre are good examples. Don't feed sedum acre.

Tortoises also eat some members of the Vetch family and those also grow quite well in the UK.

A lot of mediterranean plants won't survive a single winter in Scotland and many don't survive even a slight frost and dislike having wet feet. A lot of them would do well in a heated frost free greenhouse.

Holger Vetter's book Herman's Tortoise includes a section on wild mediterranean tortoise diets. He includes members of the Asteraceae and Fabacae and Plantaginaceae families. The last of those, the Plantains, are good food plants and easy to grow. Broad and Narrow Leaved Plantain and the more decorative Hoary Plantain. They are not very exotic but they are found in the mediterranean region and are good foods for tortoises.

Another tortoises favourite is any Campanula. Various Campanula and Convolvaceae plants grow in Corsica and tortoises eat them. Many of those can be grown in the UK and are attractive garden plants too.

Things get more complicated with the buttercup family. It's another large group and tortoises definitely eat them in the wild but we're sometimes warned not to feed this to captive tortoises. Tortoises in the wild might be carefully mixing and matching what they eat so that any poisons are cancelled out by something else. In captivity they won't be able to do this.

If I lived somewhere with better weather I would try to grow a wider variety of Mediterranean plants for food. In some parts of the UK people can grow olive trees etc , but not here.

Tortoises eat grape vine leaves and I think they would count as Mediterranean plants. My neighbour has a huge one in her greenhouse which is handy in summer.

CherryBrandy · 11-12-2016, 04:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shell-shocked

hi, i have not been able to find anywhere that lists the best common feeder plants for hermanni in their natural habitat. any ideas? thank you. i'd like to try to cultivate some of them...

welcome Shell shocked, most torts love pansies I find and they are so easy to grow from shop bought seeds or seeded. They love the flowers also. Chicory is a real winner also and good on most soils...if I cant seed I will buy the out of date olds seeds for 10p from garden centres but most plants will seed. Nasturtiums weren't a big hit but they love the flowers....CB

shell-shocked · 14-12-2016, 05:42 PM

thanks everyone, that's helpful. i do consult the tortoisetable but they don't list most common plants eaten by hermanni in all of their natural habitats. i'm currently growing plantain, and by the end of next summer i will be picking it off the ground all through the winter here, likewise with dandelion. i have what looks like several kinds of dandelion but i'm leery about feeding other than the one i know. should i post pictures here? i have plaintain but was trying to obliterate it for the last eight years. so not much there. lots of dandelion and some plants i'll post pics of and you can tell me what i've got. because there are a LOT of weeds and plants growing outside here on the west coast. soil is very acidic here. i've got plantain starts in their natural soil and have loaded about an inch of calcium sand on top of the soil. i see now how important it is to make "hay" from summer stores and while the sun shines. so i'll get those pansies started under grow lights. i chose shell-shocked because my brother died end of september, and munster was his tortoise. and he adored him. so i just had to bring him back to gabriola island with me. shell-shocked, no kidding. doing lots of reading but really worried about food wth all the conflicting information. how does one ensure the tort is getting the right amount of calcium? i have a couple of cuttlebones in there. he'll go for it but not daily by any means. i didn't want to supplement with
THANK YOU
munster's aunty colette
also i wanted to upload photos but the site asks for a url link. any other way to upload to this site?

Jan W · 15-12-2016, 06:22 PM

Photos - The only way I know to load photos is via photobucket. It is free but you need to sign up. You then upload your photographs to photobucket and this is easy to do. The next stage is to click on the photo and then copy to the image area. You then past onto this area of a message.

Not sure if I have explained very well, but I managed to do it and I'm a bit slow on the IT side.

I was so sorry to hear about your brother. Munster is lucky to have you take care of him.

Something I did to help me identify weeds, was to buy a packet of weed seeds from the shelled warrior shop. Have no idea about how much calcium and assume my 2 will work it out for themselves. I leave cuttlefish and my female chomps on it but I rarely see the male do this. I do add nutrobol to their weeds, but interestingly the female doesn't seem to notice, but the male prefers the weeds without it on. It does have a slight smell to it,

Ozric Jonathan · 15-12-2016, 08:25 PM

Hi shell-shocked. I just realised that you are hailing us from off the west coast of Canada and must be 5000 miles away from me. Which puts my plant growing advice into perspective!!

The plantain family are very good because the proportions of phosphorous and calcium are ideal. So grow as many plantains as you can. Dandelions are not very good in the calcium-phosphorous ratio but don't abandon them. Dandelions are very diverse and in the UK alone there are 215 recognised separate species of dandelion. It's unwise to generalise about them too much but they are not great from a calcium point of view.

You are right about the Tortoise Table in that they mostly have plants on there which can be grown reasonably easily in the UK. But I stand by it because they do have a good knowledge base and a lot of the plants they recommend probably would grow where you are.

We'd be interested in photos of the local weeds but to be honest we might not be good at identifying them. Because of the retreat of the last ice age the UK ended up with quite a modest number of plant species and some of us can recognise a high proportion of them but none of that will help you where you are.

I've been to the mediterranean countries a few times and looked at tortoise habitats and I could recognise almost nothing without using a book.

Maybe I can help a bit though, as I've got a couple of books which do have quite a bit of information between them about what tortoises in the Mediterranean region are known to eat. Over Christmas I'll see if I can put a list together from those. I'd still urge caution though because feeding in captivity is just not the same as wild conditions even if we have the same plants. You've already noticed about your soil and yes it is worth doing what you can to make it less acidic.

Males don't have the same calcium needs as females and I've noticed my males hardly bother with the cuttlefish.

If you can grow plants under lights then it might be worth getting Opuntia Cactus. They are good for calcium but are slow to grow.

Ozric Jonathan · 15-12-2016, 08:33 PM

Can you get your hands on any Pre Alpin?

http://www.shelledwarriorsshop.co.uk...ost-7595-p.asp

there are a few versions and they are all good.

09-12-2016, 10:06 AM	#1
shell-shocked Junior Member Egg Join Date: Dec 2016 Posts: 7	mediterranean feederplants hi, i have not been able to find anywhere that lists the best common feeder plants for hermanni in their natural habitat. any ideas? thank you. i'd like to try to cultivate some of them...

09-12-2016, 07:57 PM	#3
Jan W Senior Member Sub Adult Join Date: Oct 2015 Location: Hampshire Posts: 1,400	Great name - shell shocked. Welcome to the forum. __________________ Jan Horsfields - Bertie & Beatrice

11-12-2016, 01:49 PM	#4
Ozric Jonathan Senior Member Adult Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: West of Scotland Posts: 4,226	Hi there. A good source of information generally is The Tortoise Table http://www.thetortoisetable.org.uk/site/plants_19.asp The Mediterranean region has a huge number of plants compared to the UK and there is a limited knowledge about what wild tortoises eat. There have been various studies but what seems to happen is that the tortoise eats a high proportion of the plants that grow in that area but this differs greatly between various areas. Tortoises eat many of the plants in the group Asteracae. There are many thousands of species. They eat sedums and there are a quite a few of those that are suitable to grow in the garden. Sedum Album and sedum rupestre are good examples. Don't feed sedum acre. Tortoises also eat some members of the Vetch family and those also grow quite well in the UK. A lot of mediterranean plants won't survive a single winter in Scotland and many don't survive even a slight frost and dislike having wet feet. A lot of them would do well in a heated frost free greenhouse. Holger Vetter's book Herman's Tortoise includes a section on wild mediterranean tortoise diets. He includes members of the Asteraceae and Fabacae and Plantaginaceae families. The last of those, the Plantains, are good food plants and easy to grow. Broad and Narrow Leaved Plantain and the more decorative Hoary Plantain. They are not very exotic but they are found in the mediterranean region and are good foods for tortoises. Another tortoises favourite is any Campanula. Various Campanula and Convolvaceae plants grow in Corsica and tortoises eat them. Many of those can be grown in the UK and are attractive garden plants too. Things get more complicated with the buttercup family. It's another large group and tortoises definitely eat them in the wild but we're sometimes warned not to feed this to captive tortoises. Tortoises in the wild might be carefully mixing and matching what they eat so that any poisons are cancelled out by something else. In captivity they won't be able to do this. If I lived somewhere with better weather I would try to grow a wider variety of Mediterranean plants for food. In some parts of the UK people can grow olive trees etc , but not here. Tortoises eat grape vine leaves and I think they would count as Mediterranean plants. My neighbour has a huge one in her greenhouse which is handy in summer. __________________ Testudo Hermanni Hermanni (Corse) tortoises Last edited by Ozric Jonathan; 11-12-2016 at 01:52 PM.

14-12-2016, 05:42 PM	#6
shell-shocked Junior Member Egg Join Date: Dec 2016 Posts: 7	cdn west coast munster thanks everyone, that's helpful. i do consult the tortoisetable but they don't list most common plants eaten by hermanni in all of their natural habitats. i'm currently growing plantain, and by the end of next summer i will be picking it off the ground all through the winter here, likewise with dandelion. i have what looks like several kinds of dandelion but i'm leery about feeding other than the one i know. should i post pictures here? i have plaintain but was trying to obliterate it for the last eight years. so not much there. lots of dandelion and some plants i'll post pics of and you can tell me what i've got. because there are a LOT of weeds and plants growing outside here on the west coast. soil is very acidic here. i've got plantain starts in their natural soil and have loaded about an inch of calcium sand on top of the soil. i see now how important it is to make "hay" from summer stores and while the sun shines. so i'll get those pansies started under grow lights. i chose shell-shocked because my brother died end of september, and munster was his tortoise. and he adored him. so i just had to bring him back to gabriola island with me. shell-shocked, no kidding. doing lots of reading but really worried about food wth all the conflicting information. how does one ensure the tort is getting the right amount of calcium? i have a couple of cuttlebones in there. he'll go for it but not daily by any means. i didn't want to supplement with THANK YOU munster's aunty colette also i wanted to upload photos but the site asks for a url link. any other way to upload to this site?

15-12-2016, 06:22 PM	#7
Jan W Senior Member Sub Adult Join Date: Oct 2015 Location: Hampshire Posts: 1,400	Photos - The only way I know to load photos is via photobucket. It is free but you need to sign up. You then upload your photographs to photobucket and this is easy to do. The next stage is to click on the photo and then copy to the image area. You then past onto this area of a message. Not sure if I have explained very well, but I managed to do it and I'm a bit slow on the IT side. I was so sorry to hear about your brother. Munster is lucky to have you take care of him. Something I did to help me identify weeds, was to buy a packet of weed seeds from the shelled warrior shop. Have no idea about how much calcium and assume my 2 will work it out for themselves. I leave cuttlefish and my female chomps on it but I rarely see the male do this. I do add nutrobol to their weeds, but interestingly the female doesn't seem to notice, but the male prefers the weeds without it on. It does have a slight smell to it, __________________ Jan Horsfields - Bertie & Beatrice

15-12-2016, 08:25 PM	#8
Ozric Jonathan Senior Member Adult Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: West of Scotland Posts: 4,226	Hi shell-shocked. I just realised that you are hailing us from off the west coast of Canada and must be 5000 miles away from me. Which puts my plant growing advice into perspective!! The plantain family are very good because the proportions of phosphorous and calcium are ideal. So grow as many plantains as you can. Dandelions are not very good in the calcium-phosphorous ratio but don't abandon them. Dandelions are very diverse and in the UK alone there are 215 recognised separate species of dandelion. It's unwise to generalise about them too much but they are not great from a calcium point of view. You are right about the Tortoise Table in that they mostly have plants on there which can be grown reasonably easily in the UK. But I stand by it because they do have a good knowledge base and a lot of the plants they recommend probably would grow where you are. We'd be interested in photos of the local weeds but to be honest we might not be good at identifying them. Because of the retreat of the last ice age the UK ended up with quite a modest number of plant species and some of us can recognise a high proportion of them but none of that will help you where you are. I've been to the mediterranean countries a few times and looked at tortoise habitats and I could recognise almost nothing without using a book. Maybe I can help a bit though, as I've got a couple of books which do have quite a bit of information between them about what tortoises in the Mediterranean region are known to eat. Over Christmas I'll see if I can put a list together from those. I'd still urge caution though because feeding in captivity is just not the same as wild conditions even if we have the same plants. You've already noticed about your soil and yes it is worth doing what you can to make it less acidic. Males don't have the same calcium needs as females and I've noticed my males hardly bother with the cuttlefish. If you can grow plants under lights then it might be worth getting Opuntia Cactus. They are good for calcium but are slow to grow. __________________ Testudo Hermanni Hermanni (Corse) tortoises Last edited by Ozric Jonathan; 15-12-2016 at 08:33 PM.

15-12-2016, 08:33 PM	#9
Ozric Jonathan Senior Member Adult Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: West of Scotland Posts: 4,226	Can you get your hands on any Pre Alpin? http://www.shelledwarriorsshop.co.uk...ost-7595-p.asp there are a few versions and they are all good. __________________ Testudo Hermanni Hermanni (Corse) tortoises Last edited by Ozric Jonathan; 15-12-2016 at 08:36 PM.

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