Today, I went out and gathered a bunch of grass to feed my rabbits. It doesn’t cost much to buy them food, but they absolutely love the grasses I find. I’ve put down grass from the yard on their poo and store hay in their bowl for them to eat. When I came back, they had eaten the grass out of the poo pile and left the hay in their bowl.
So I’m not going to buy hay if I don’t have to. However, my yard isn’t big enough right now to feed my rabbits exclusively, so I rode my bike down the street to gather grass from an abandoned/neglected lot. I ended up get a fair amount of grass, and there’s plenty more for me to gather later on.
I felt very pleased with myself, but when I got home, I noticed all these whelps running up and down my arms.
At first, I thought they were bites, but I didn’t notice anything biting me. They also appeared way too quickly to be a bug bite; it was like I was allergic to something. After thinking about it, I realized they looked a lot like the whelp that formed when I got an allergy prick test. When they pricked me with the histamines, that spot ballooned so fast and so large that the allergy specialist nurse was surprised – and she must have seen it all.
Then I realized, when you injure plants, they release histamines! I’d been cutting down tall grass for half an hour with it whacking my arms. Of course I had whelps all over!
The good news is that it’s already significantly better after only 30 minutes, but now I know I should definitely wear long sleeves and gloves. I knew I was sensitive to histamines, but I didn’t know it was that bad.
Frugal Treehugger 