Weekly vegetables

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PiggyLover18

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Hi!
I want your opinions, is this enough vegetables for 3 adult female guinea pigs for a week? I always make sure to check how often I can give each vegetable. They get about a cup of mixed veggies, a little different every day, sometimes a little bit of fruit, 1/4 cup of pellets per piggie and unlimited amounts of hay each day.

So this week I got them:
1 head od curly lettuce
1 head of butterhead lettuce
Celery
1 head of romaine lettuce
1 small head of Kale
1 big fennel
3 small zucchinis
3 small cucumbers
A bag of carrots
1 small box of cherry tomatoes
Spinach

Is this good? Also, I wanted to mention that they are a little picky and don't like bell peppers (tried a lot of times to give it to them and they won't eat it at all), otherwise I would get that too.

All the opinions and advice will be greatly appreciated😊
 
So you are aiming for one cup of veg per pig per day and I see that is what you are doing.

Ideally you need to limit the use of spinach and kale as they are both high in calcium. I only feed such high calcium veg once per week and if mine get kale, then they wouldn’t get spinach in the same week

Carrots, tomatoes snd fruit should be kept limited and used as an occasional treat. Carrots are high in sugar and tomatoes are acidic and can lead to cheilitis if fed too often.
You could try adding in some herbs for variety as well. My two love mint, basil, coriander best.

One tablespoon of pellets per pig per day (I actually weighed out one tablespoon this morning and it came to just 6g of pellets)

If you live in a hard water area, then filtering their drinking water and keeping pellets limited to one tablespoon will go a long way to limiting their calcium intake (of course they do still require some calcium, but you don’t want lots in excess)
 
Merab's Slave said:
Mine also love chicory as a vegetable as well as the herbs
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I remember when your piggies stayed with us and you left us lots of chicory @Merab's Slave and our bigpig Clover wolfed down a whole one before she realised it wasnt a novel lettuce! Clover's opinion on chicory is the same as Jemimah's opinion on beansprouts :)
 
@PiggyLover18 coriander/cilantro is a very popular lower calcium high vit C herb to feed regularly, even daily- and beansprouts are also a good source of vit C and very popular with some piggies as a once or twice a week food. But definitely not with @Merab's Slave 's grand old lady Queen Jemimah :)
 
Piggies&buns said:
So you are aiming for one cup of veg per pig per day and I see that is what you are doing.

Ideally you need to limit the use of spinach and kale as they are both high in calcium. I only feed such high calcium veg once per week and if mine get kale, then they wouldn’t get spinach in the same week

Carrots, tomatoes snd fruit should be kept limited and used as an occasional treat. Carrots are high in sugar and tomatoes are acidic and can lead to cheilitis if fed too often.
You could try adding in some herbs for variety as well. My two love mint, basil, coriander best.

One tablespoon of pellets per pig per day (I actually weighed out one tablespoon this morning and it came to just 6g of pellets)

If you live in a hard water area, then filtering their drinking water and keeping pellets limited to one tablespoon will go a long way to limiting their calcium intake (of course they do still require some calcium, but you don’t want lots in excess)
Click to expand...
Apart from spinach and kale are there any other vegetables that are that high in calcium and need to be limited? Thank you :)
 
Peachylady said:
Apart from spinach and kale are there any other vegetables that are that high in calcium and need to be limited? Thank you :)
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Parsley and dill are high calcium herbs, but most of the excess calcium in a potential piggy diet come from the pellets- even lower calcium pellets contain about 4x as much calcium as high calcium veg, and with this being a dry food it is much more concentrated and harder on the kidneys and bladder!
I often skip pellets if I'm feeding a spinach, kale or parsley meal and just scatter the veg in a pile of hay :)
 
PigglePuggle said:
Parsley and dill are high calcium herbs, but most of the excess calcium in a potential piggy diet come from the pellets- even lower calcium pellets contain about 4x as much calcium as high calcium veg, and with this being a dry food it is much more concentrated and harder on the kidneys and bladder!
I often skip pellets if I'm feeding a spinach, kale or parsley meal and just scatter the veg in a pile of hay :)
Click to expand...
That's good to know. Thanks so much!
 
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