Plan Ahead for Dogs in the Garden



















A parade of Seeing Eye pups has passed through our garden during the past six years. They arrive, cute as a button at a mere 7 – 10 pounds (that’s Christine), but grow quickly into full-sized Labrador Retrievers that top the scales at 50+ pounds. Our own Emma weighs in at 70.

Because a human life may ultimately depend upon a Seeing Eye dog guide, these puppies must be raised in a somewhat more restrictive way than a pet would be, but they’re still allowed to have lots of fun and plenty of play time. At our house that means chasing Frisbees, retrieving balls, and splashing around in the doggie pool (Emma and Harriet).

When we added on to our house in 2000, our old garden was completely destroyed by the construction equipment. Gardeners are such optimists! I viewed this as an opportunity for a complete redo. Julie Moir Messervy’s book The Inward Garden was very helpful in visualizing areas for various activities, one of the most important of these being enough running room for two high speed Labrador freight trains (Emma and Christine). Planning ahead really paid off.

Have realistic expectations. You will not have a perfect lawn, because running paws compact soil. There will be the usual puppy antics of digging holes and pulling out the plants that you have just put in, but even the pups that can’t seem to be trained out of it, eventually outgrow such shenanigans. If your dog will swim, provide a warm, sunny spot for it to dry off. Unless you assign dogs a play space, they’ll choose one of their own, or worse, view the entire yard, flowerbeds and all, as one big dog park.

Emma has an accommodating personality. A simple “no” or “out of there” is enough. But even strong-willed dogs, like Okra (with Ligularia) can be trained to stay away from the flowers. What’s required is some visual cue such as flags, or an audible cue such as your voice, that helps them to understand, “I can go this far and no further.” With a new Seeing Eye pup arriving every 24 months, for us this training never ends. But the reward is a relatively undamaged planted space.

Emma ensures that I’m never lonely in the garden (Emma and me). She moves from place to place with me, finds a comfortable spot to lie down, and is content to garden by observation.

To see how other gardeners juggle the demands of their favorite pets with their favorite hobby, click on over to this month’s design workshop at Gardening Gone Wild (http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/?p=3278). Thanks for the excuse to boast about our best friends, Nan.

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which ...
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery...
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have...
Keep reading