This message is from: Karen McCarthy <[email protected]>
I'll say this about this subject: It really depends where you live and what you can live with! Kelly lives on Vancouver Island and pepper trees & eucalyptus aren't gonna cut it. Not for long anyways. Too wet & cold for the pepper, and a random freeze would zap the eucs. If a Fjord can get its mouth around it, it's going to try to eat it, whether it is good for the horse or not. So, fence it off... When I moved up to central Oregon 3 years ago, our place had a nice long line of about 38, 40'+ tall Black Locusts (Robina spp.)Looked really creepy in the winter too, gaveour place that Addams family feeling, ick! Then I just about had a heart attack when I read up on them. All parts toxic to grazing livestock! Very Addams family indeedy! These trees were literally dumping arm-sized branches daily into my mares paddock, and they gleefully munched them up, bark & all. They especially loved the dried seedpods. Luckily these trees were dormant so no green leaves. I had them removed w/in a week. They brought in a logging truck to haul off the trunks...and I ended up getting a free job* as the tree guy sold ALL of it for high $$$ firewood - guess it's pretty hot, hard wood. (* Still had to rake up all the debris and there was TONS of it, and to make this even more Fjord related, my mare Idelle was recruited to pull a big tarp around to gather up small handpiles and drag them to the main burn pile. She was a very good girl with that scary tarp! My neighbors got a taste of Fjord work ethics too, they couldn't believe what I was doing.) Anyways, there is a tree not very high up on the highbrow horticulturists lists of trees, it's actually considered a "trash tree": the Siberian Elm (Ulmus pumila) We have 4, 50'+ high elms on our place and they are our only shade for our house, so we really take care of them, which means correctly pruning them to lessen the branch load as they do drop quite a few leaves and branches in our strong winds. But - the ponies LOVE them! If a whole branch breaks out of the tree, I drag it off to the drylot where the equine termites, er, Fjords descend on it with gusto. No known toxcicity that I can find, BUT, it may not be something you want to landscape with. Personally they don't offend me, but some people think they are hideous. They might change their minds if they had to live in a 1902 house w/ insulated walls or roof... Off the top of my head I know some Maples (Acer spp.) are very toxic (Red maples?). Oaks (Quercus spp.) are not really so bad in my experience, at least Black, Valley & Blue Oaks we had in Calif. The trees were very tall and we did keep up with acorn patrol raking most of them up that rolled into the paddocks. I know most fruit trees, especially pit fruits are toxic and if the horses ingest many of the pits the cyanide in them can build up to high levels which is most unhealthy. Happy Horse-scaping! Kmac in central Oregon where Fall is "in the air" as is the smoke from the grass fields...ugh. Important FjordHorse List Links: Subscription Management: http://tinyurl.com/5msa7e FH-L Archives: http://tinyurl.com/rcepw Classified Ads: http://tinyurl.com/5b5g2f
