Fat hen. It’s coming folks ! (Sound of ominous organ music)
A summer annual, that is prolific and grows everywhere. It is invasive, effects yield, drowns out desirable species and often ignored by horses. One year I had a turnout area completely over run with it and the hand pulling almost broke my back. I’m talking a day in bed recovery time and a massage! Hubby said it would have been cheaper to pay some local teenagers a tenner each to pull it for us. I’ve done that before with fence painting! It loves gravel and cracked baked bare earth to settle its seedlings. One single plant can produce 20,000 seeds! Upright but can fall over due to the weight of foliage and seeds. The first leaves, near the base of the plant, are toothed and roughly diamond-shaped, 3–7 cm long, but those on the upper part of the flowering stems are narrower and oval, with a whitish coat on the underside.
Fat Hen flowers from July to September. It is wind pollinated and the flowers may be cross- or self-pollinated. It’s a self sufficient reproductive critter!
Can be eaten like spinach and cabbage as it’s rich in Vitamin C but horses tend to avoid them, hens, sheep and pigs like them though. If you want to try it yourself, try steaming it. The leaves are a source of ascaridole, an oil used to treat infestations of round worms and hook worms. It’s an easy weed to hand pull or spray as a very young plant. Or throw it on your compost heap, mow it in or chop and drop to add to your permaculture. It’s high in P and K. Ensure you do so before flowering and seed formation. Fat Hen is killed by frost.
Recent research carried out in Wales by an animal feed manufacturer has shown that extracts of Fat hen can help to prevent EMS. The leaves of fat hen contain phytoecdysteroids, which have been found to prevent and reduce the deposition of fats, through a hypoglycaemic effect. Owing to the high nitrate levels in the plants themselves, it is envisaged that the preferred method of administration would be as a feed supplement, and at a fraction of the cost of current treatments. More research is needed to look at dosage or whether specific extracts only in concentrated form would have an effect. I’d be tempted to put some leaves, (not seeds, imagine the horse dunging them everywhere!) in the feed bucket if I saw a bit more research.
Comments