Bog Myrtle & Peat

Without wanting to get too turnip-heavy, it’s worth noting one practical detail about feeding turnips to cattle.

My cows were baffled by turnips at first. They had never seen anything so ridiculous, and all my carefully-grown roots were completely ignored. So on the advice of friends and neighbours, I began to chop them up with a shovel. That was fine, but it takes a little while to chop a hundred turnips every morning. After a month, I began to wonder if the cattle had learnt that turnips were food and could be left to eat the whole thing without being cut. Developing this hypothesis, I turned out a dozen turnips as an experiment.

Here are my findings:

Cows like the shaws (leaves) best. So faced with a whole turnip, a cow will eat the shaws and the stalk first. Then the uncut turnip is almost spherical and it becomes very difficult for a cow to pick it up or eat it. So they chase the turnips round with their noses as if they were dooking for apples with their hands behind their backs. Sometimes they’ll roll the turnip a long way away, then they’ll give up and it’ll be lost. More likely, they’ll roll the turnip round and round until it goes in a cowpat, at which point they’ll turn up their nose and say “that’s disgusting – I’m not eating that”. The cows were able to eat approximately 50% of the whole turnips without any bother, but the other half was being lost or wasted in cowpats. That’s quite a poor success rate.

Conclusion: chop them in half with one strike of a shovel. That way they won’t roll away, and you aren’t bound up for hours mashing turnips into fancy little chips.

All this might seem blindingly obvious to many readers, but learning this kind of stuff at first hand keeps this whole project interesting.