The juice shop near me has large shallow bins of wheat grass. I know cats love it and I asked if they just toss out the clumps when they’ve cut off the top. They said they do. I asked it I could regrow them for my cat, but one staff member said that it wouldn’t regrow very well, that it would just be little yellow shoots. This then started a debate among the staff and my request that they run an experiment was considered.
So, has anybody tried this? Why wouldn’t it regrow?
It’s a wheat relative that is a one life cycle plant. It sprouts, gets foliage, and reproduces. Cut it off and you have cut off the part that will grow until it reproduces. It’s not like cutting lawn grass, that is a perennial. Perennial grasses have a mechanisim to regrow from the roots.
Well, so much for that free cat toy idea. thanks for the info.
It depends how early on in the growth cycle it has been cut - it’s not unheard of for farmers to let sheep graze a field in which a young cereal crop is growing - they have to control the timing a bit carefully so that they don’t overgraze, but if done correctly, the sheep get a meal and the crop gets a bit of fertiliser, and regrows from the remaining stem - supposedly branching out and producing more stalks - and a heavier crop.
Whether or not any of this translates to anything meaningful in terms of your bins of wheat grass, it’s hard to say, and it may be that the growing medium in the bins has been dosed with a carefully measured amount of plant food that will be depleted at this point.
So if you’re going to try it, you might want to water with a dilute solution of balanced plant food.