Coastal Hay and the garden

[GardenSpots]

I am new to rabbits. I am calling around in my area thinking I might buy a bale of hay from the feed store as it is sigificantly cheaper than buying it any other way. We have coastal hay around here. Does anyone know of a source where I could get Timothy locally?

My main concern with Coastal is that it is a type of bermuda grass which is extremely invasive. The thing that finally put me over the top in deciding to finally get a rabbit is that I can use the manure in the garden. That's a big plus for me as I doubled the size of my garden this year. I fight bermuda enough in the garden the way it is. I am not sure I want to feed the rabbit coastal hay only to introduce more bermuda in the garden when I use the manure. Has anyone fed coastal, then used the rabbit manure in the garden and had problems with the bermuda seeding itself in the garden?

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[whitelop]

I feed coastal and I've never had an issue with the grass seeding in anything. In fact there are a bunch of poops in my yard right now and its been raining for a week and so far nothing.
I actually spread coastal over a bed of bulbs to keep my chickens out of it and still nothing sprouted. I removed the hay months after I put it down, and no new grasses. I put coast in my old chicken run for them to play in and nothing came up there either. So far they've been out of that run for several weeks and no bermuda has come up yet and that is a very well fertilized area!

The coastal that I had was a really late cut though, like second possibly third, so maybe it didn't have as many seed heads, but I personally haven't had an issue with it. And I have very fertile ground because of the chickens and just the old soil I have is amazing.
I've never seen seed heads in rabbit poop, but then again, I don't break them open that often. LOL
I want to say that you'll be okay, but I couldn't promise you that!

I do know that my rabbit really enjoyed eating the coastal hay that she had.

 

[GardenSpots]

Well, that sounds encouraging. Maybe I will give it a try then. I need to figure out a good way and place to store it, but even if I ended up composting half of it, I'd still be way ahead on price.

 

[majorv]

We would like to find Timothy hay bales, too, but haven't found it in any feed store. We've been using horse quality coastal for years with zero problems. Our rabbits are outside and so any they don't eat falls through to the ground. We've never had a problem with any of it seeding either.

We bought a plastic patio bin and it holds our bale of hay. We have it sitting up off the ground and it keeps it dry.