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Garden journal entry |
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panels across four seedling beds |
April 21, 2025. My regular readers (do I have any of those?) will remember that my gardening efforts are routinely thwarted by my two beloved but destructive dogs, Hippie and Birdie. Their havoc they wreak is especially devastating in my seedling nursery area, where every dog pawprint in recently watered soil can easily take out a number of my carefully raised seedlings. I've previously shared a few of my attempts to minimize the damage they do, such as this fencing-out strategy from 2023, which used the attached-together panels of a portable dog enclosure to build a vertical barrier to exclude the girls. While that was somewhat successful, it also made it rather difficult for me to tend to those nursery beds, resulting in rampant weed proliferation and ultimately quite low seedling survival. So, hardly a success overall. The following year I tried to be smarter and erected a chicken-wire fence from house to side fence, aiming to exclude the dogs from the entire section of the side garden. It made for awkward mowing, but more disappointingly, Hippie and Birdie are athletic creatures, and found the barrier to be an interesting but not very challenging obstacle in their running-around-the-yard endeavors. It was perhaps a partial success, since they did seem to spend less time in the seedling beds. But I was still hoping for something better. So cue up this year's new and improved strategy: those same metal grate panels, now separated from each other, arranged horizontally across individual sections of the seedling area, held aloft by some bricks. So far, I like it: the girls aren't inclined to traverse the covered areas, much like cows don't travel across cattle grates, while the seedlings can grow right through the panels, so they are not particularly bothered. To access one of the nursery beds, for setting out some more seedlings or clearing some weeds, I just need to lift a single panel off of its supporting bricks. Gardeners are an optimistic bunch, and I'm full of hope that I've found the best solution yet! |
Last modified:
September 09, 2009
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