Our bales of bedding straw came from a weedy field that wasn’t combined, so there are plenty of oats still attached to the stems.  This straw would be disastrous if used for garden mulch, but it excels as livestock bedding.  It fulfills two Maslovian first tier requirements in one package (food and shelter), almost as good as living in a gingerbread house.  But I digress…

The autumn rains sprouted the oats in the outer layer of the hay bales, creating a sixty foot long mat of oat grass running the length of the bale row.  When I was at the grocery coop a few weeks ago, I noticed that people were buying oat grass for their cats.  I guess indoor cats must eat the stuff.  Funny, our cats don’t pay any attention to the oat grass.  They gnaw on perennial grasses occasionally, but when they are climbing on the straw bales they are intent on just one thing:  finding the mice that have burrowed in among the bales.