Cats need grass

If you live with a cat, you surely know it: chewed leaves on all the domestic plants, knocked-over flowerpots, lengthy search on the internet before you buy a new flower if it isn’t poisonous for your fluffy friend.

My cat is a downright gardener. It considers itself to be the owner of all the plants in the household and it carefully oversees any manipulation with them. Once, it even plucked an onion from a flower box and it put it, sorry, it re-planted it, into the next flower box. When I water the plants, it can’t be left out. It gets in the way, tells me how to do it (probably swears that I am over-watering them again) and after I’ve watered them, it carefully checks every flowerpot and sniffs it. So a simple two-minute activity becomes a nerve-wracking situation that lasts about quarter of an hour not counting the wiping all of the spilled water.

When my boyfriend brings me a cut bouquet, the cat immediately usurps it. It sniffs it, re-arranges it and then it keeps sitting next to it constantly (it probably feels more beautiful next to it :)).

Cat grass

For purely domestic cats, this is a necessity. Cats spend most of their waking hours taking care of their fur so it’s no wonder that a considerable amount of hairs get into their belly. As we can already know from the article Mystery of cat tongues, their tongues are covered with hundreds of rough papillae in the shape of little backward bent hooks, so they can’t spit the hairs out. These settle in the stomach and form clumps (trichobezoars). If the cat doesn’t manage to vomit them out, this will lead to health issues and a surgical intervention might even be necessary.

You will find plenty of pet foods and food supplements on the market that are supposed to help the hairs pass through the digestive tract, but the most natural way is grass. It helps with elimination of the hairs from the digestive system in the same way and using it, the cat can induce vomiting if it needs to get rid of a clump inside its stomach.

Buying and growing

You can buy grown cat grass almost in every flower store or DIY store. Recently, I saw it even in some hypermarkets.

You can find seeds in pet supplies. But it is a small and rather an expensive package.

I personally buy regular grass mixture or seeds for sowing. Types with wider leaves are better. I prefer to use the so-called Easter seed shoots or cyperus: it has beautiful, green and wide, as if curly leaves. Besides, it comes from marshes, so it likes moisture and there’s no risk that I could over-water it.

Do you grow grass for cats at home? I always have a planted flower box or several flowerpots so that I never ran out of it and the cat wouldn’t start eating my flowers or its favourite palm trees.