Fun Fact of the day: Did you know timothy hay arrived in North America by accident? Well, According to Wikepedia, it did!
Timothy hay is dried timothy grass. And early settlers in the late 1600s and early 1700s unintentionally introduced it to the North American landscape. It was the year 1711 when the first official recordings of the grass are known. The description was provided by a guy called John Hurd, who’d discovered the grass growing in New Hampshire. He named it “hurd grass.” But when a farmer named Timothy Hanson began to actively cultivate it to produce hay in 1720, people began to refer to it as “timothy hay.”
The name stuck, and it’s been timothy hay ever since… (Gotta feel sorry for poor John Hurd, eh!)
Other interesting timothy hay factoids…
– Some caterpillars use timothy grass as their main food source – for example, the Essex Skipper caterpillar.
– Timothy grass requires soils that are rich in nutrients, so usually in cultivated fields. However, it can occasionally be found in other areas, such as in roadside verges.
– Timothy hay is used as a top quality nutritional food for horses, as well as cattle and small animals.
– The pollen of timothy grass is something that many people have an allergy to. Because of this, it’s been used as a component of a new hay fever vaccine called Grazax. What it does is condition the body to no longer respond to the pollen.
– Timothy grass is not to be confused with similar looking grasses (and some with similar names), such as timothy canary grass, mountain timothy and meadow foxtail.
– Timothy grass grows in other regions of the world as well as North America (with the Pacific Northwest region of the United States being the most prolific producer of timothy hay in the world). It’s native to most of Europe, although doesn’t grow in the Mediterranean region of Europe.
For more information about Small Pet Select timothy hay, check out our hay page.
Till next time – love those bunnies, piggies, chinnies and all those other small pets…
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