Raspberry Leaves

A few years ago I found out that feeding raspberry leaves to horses will help calm them,

 especially mares in heat, so I bough bag after bag of Mare Magic.

Mare Magic is just dried raspberry leaf, nothing else, and its expensive, like $15.00 for 10oz.

 

You can also buy it online for $11 per pound from a Shelton farm but that's a pain in the butt because they don't always have it available and there is a $10 shipping fee, no matter how much you order.

 So I went out & picked 2 bags of leaves at a small farm nearby.

 

The lady loaned me her dehydrator that's had been sitting in her garage for 4 years and I brought it home to try out.

 

I put my first batch of leaves in & turned it on.

 

 Closed it up and started the process.  

 



 

After about 18 hours I checked them & they are all totally dry. I realized I could put way more leaves onto each of the 6 trays.

 

And also that the stems need to be removed.

This sucked because it adds twice as much work to it but my mares cant eat the stems,

they might choke.

 

Here is the first batch, in a baggie. There have been 3 batches so far and they are getting nicer each time. But Sarah and I got lazy on the last batch, the one cooking now, we just put the leaves on the trays, we didn't remove the stems first. We were on time constraint.

 

 

After we removed the stems and crushed the leaves, these feel just like the stuff we have been buying online.

 

I figure with the leaves Sarah and I picked today and the ones I got the other day that we might have enough for 5 lbs of dried leaves, about enough for our 3 mares for a year, or spring & summer.

 

If we find more leaves to pick before the fall weather hits, we might get enough to process for selling but this won't happen if my electricity bill goes through the roof.