There’s always something to worry about when you have a horse.  Now we have to worry about weeds too.  I guess we always did.

What are weeds?  They are wild flowers that grow where we don’t want them to.  Sometimes they are just weeds.  Annoying weeds.  Hard to pull weeds.  But sometimes they are poisonous to our horses.

Now if your horse doesn’t have beautiful pasture they will sometimes just eat the weeds.  Sometimes when they do have beautiful pasture, they will just eat weeds.

Sometimes it takes a lot of one particular weed to kill a horse, and sometimes it doesn’t take that much to make them sick.

We have two that I see a lot of.  One is Coffee Bean, but I was told it takes a whole bag of them to really do damage.  The other one is sneaky.  It’s Creeping Indigo.  It creeps under the grass and you don’t notice it until it blooms.  The leaves look like clover, and it has the prettiest coral flower.  Horses absolutely love the sweet taste, but it will kill them.  I’ve found two little patches and I’ve been working on getting rid of it for 3 years.  But they pop up and yell “Surprise!” every once in a while.  It is in an area where the horses don’t graze, but I don’t want it anywhere, because it will spread.  There is an Indigo plant that grows upward, that is not poisonous.  Same pretty flowers.  The bad stuff creeps under your grass, or along the ground.

Are you aware of the poisonous weeds and plants in your area?  Do you even look for them?  Do you know what they are?  Do you even know how to dispose of them?

I know there is a book out on Poisonous Plants for horses.  A lot of them we wouldn’t even consider to be harmful to our horses.  When we moved here I did all this landscaping to pretty the place up, it was barren.  Boy did I have to rethink my choice of plants when I got that book.  “Do Over!”

It might be a good thing to invest in that kind of a book or look up on the Internet to find out what plants are poisonous to horses and what are especially common in your area.

It’s interesting to find out if you’ve been lucky so far, and will make your horses life a whole lot safer in the long run.

This for your consideration.