Monday, May 27, 2013

Dandelion Greens: Natural And Free Supplement For Dogs' Great Health

In our part of the world everything just turned green nearly over night. And while things grow rapidly under the late night sun and white nights, I have been waiting patiently (and sometimes also not so patiently) for a number of wild herbs to show up.

One of them is my all time favorite DANDELION.
The young, fresh, great tasting leaves are out now and I am planning to make a salad for ourselves out of them.

But this post is not about my favorite wild food recipes, but rather about what we do with dandelions in  their different vegetation stages, in our canine kitchen.
I have previously blogged about our Dandelion Cure for the dogs, made from mostly the blossoms, and about the benefits and healing properties of this wild herb.

Here is what we do with the young, freshly harvested leaves:




As you can see, nothing is simpler than grabbing a handful (or more, depending on the amount of dogs you feed) of leaves and chopping them to small pieces.


Then add all the other supplements and mix in well with the meat and rest of food.

On the picture above you can see an individual portion made for one of our dogs who gets completely kibble free diet due to his allergic reactions to any commercial dog food - this particular menu consists of ground raw chicken meat and bones with steamed oat flakes and fresh dandelion greens, plus supplements.

This is our use of the spring dandelion greens. We feed it 3-4 times a week. Later we switch to the blossoms, picked on a sunny day, when the healing properties of the herb get most powerful.

As the summer will progress, we´ll be harvesting and drying both the leaves and blossoms for the dogs´ weekly detoxication cures in the fall and winter time.

So, you can see that feeding healthy and adding natural supplements to your dogs´ feeding program doesn´t have to be neither expensive nor difficult and time consuming.

And last, but not least, here are a few useful information on the benefits of dandelion root, including a recipe for tea (both for human and animal consumption):




1 comment:

ainnirbard said...

My boy Gambit loves this time of year. He is completely crazy about the flowering part of dandelions! He will drag me all over the lawn to get to those little yellow flowers!! At least they are good for him. Thanks for the article...might need to go pick some leaves too!