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Garden journal entry |
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Run this way, girls! |
December 23, 2024. Sharing a backyard with two enthusiastic dogs is not always conducive to gardening success. Our older mutt Hippie was a digger when she was young, but had outgrown that tendency by the time our younger one Birdie came along. Alas, Birdie has thus far shown no sign of outgrowing the urge to uproot.This is immediately obvious from the lunar landscape into which our backyard lawn has devolved, and has also proven treacherous for all manner of newly planted seedlings and nursery purchases. I still hope that next year will be better in this regard.
A different dog challenge is that of treating the garden as a high-speed running track. Again, the lawn is the most immediate evidence of this, with the stretch of grass favored for their most exuberant running, traversing most of the back side of the house, worn down to mostly bare soil. But lawn grass is just there to eventually become garden borders, right? So my bigger concern is those borders. It seems like there's always cause to run into the borders and bark at the fence, often accompanied by enthusiastically jumping at the fence, of course trampling anything that might happen to be attempting to grow underneath. Despite my many attempts to impress upon them what "in the grass!" means, those girls just don't seem to get it. So I've resorted to surrounding particularly vulnerable plantings with upright sticks and poles meant to discourage the worst abuse. With some success, anyway.
Another type of havoc is wrought simply by high-speed travel through especially popular borders – of which the primary example is the area between our pond and the back fence, which Hippie and Birdie treat as the back leg of their Formula 1 course. The circuit also includes a good part of the Rock Garden Zone that faithful readers may remember inspired me with so much hope for becoming a special area filled with plants requiring excellent drainage. Alas, nothing much will grow there, courtesy of unrelenting rapid paw movement with no regard for greenery. A year ago, hoping to remedy the situation, I installed a few two-foot-tall chicken-wire fences across their preferred path. Silly me – it was futile. The fences became fun obstacles to hurdle across, or to bypass by instead taking a shortcut along the rocks lining the pond. Meanwhile, the fences impeded my own gardening efforts. So last week, I decided to try a new approach: create a single opening through the main fenceline, and line up some really big flagstones as a path through that opening, in hopes of encouraging travel only along that pathway, and limiting damage to adjacent garden areas. It's too early to tell if the strategy is working (I've still seen prominent pawprints in nearby areas I was trying to protect), but I'll give it a while. At least it's easier for me to get to that back area now. |
Last modified:
September 09, 2009
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