Navaho Gunleg

A couple of weeks ago I was giving one of our rabbits some food, rabbit pellets. These usually consist of different types of grass-seeds and pellets made of dried grasses. Not that interesting at all I know.

But there is this other thing in the rabbit pellet mix that I couldn’t put my finger on as to what it exactly was, some brown, shrunken piece of, well, ’stuff’. The only thing I knew is that, when I tasted it myself, it had a bit of a sweet taste, so I assumed it to be some fruit of some sorts. I hadn’t given it any more mind until 2 weeks ago, when my girlfriend noticed that there was a seed still in the dried fruit-like thingy.

Curious as I am, I got the seed out, put it in some pot and made a promise to regularly water the soil so it can actually grow. For the heck of it, I threw other seeds (mostly grass) from the rabbit-mix into some soil as well.

Days passed, and nothing happened.

Impatient as I am, I removed some of the soil to look at the seed and it looked like it was opening up. Few days later, you could see a stem growing. I immediately moved the pot to a more sunny spot. The other seeds weren’t doing anything, by the way.

Being busy, we totally forgot about it again, until yesterday when I saw that the stem was now standing upright with 2 leaves on the top:

It was only then that I started thinking that I now really need to figure out what type of plant this is. So I grabbed my laptop, googled a bit and I ended up at various animal food grocers websites, reading the ingredients of their pellets until I read ‘Johannesbroodboom‘ (tr: ‘St. John’s Bread tree‘ — obviously something biblical is going one here). Wondering whatever the heck that is, I tried to find an image of said tree. I found it, and also found out that another word for this thing is ‘carob tree‘ and it can grow to about this big:

These trees have pods. These pods are dried and because of its high energy, high fiber content, it’s put in various animal foodstuffs and has been used as an alternative for sugar and chocolate for ages:

Strangely enough the seeds in the pods are called ‘locust beans‘.

The most interesting fact I read about these seeds is that these weigh about 24 mg — just about as must as one carat of gold — so people used these seeds to weigh gold. The seed of the carob tree was called ‘keration’, meaning ‘the fruit of the carob’, and that’s where the word ‘carat‘ comes from we all use.

Of course, although I love the sheer size and shape, I’m not letting this thing grow as big as on the above black-and-white image, but will put it in some container. I do wonder what species of carob this exactly is because, some of them are hermaphrodite and self-furtile, but a lot aren’t.

It is very likely I will never see any fruit developing — but that won’t take the fun out of trying.

Rabbits, Food, Seeds, Growing, Carob