I will be the first to admit that I am not really a dog person. I am a cat person. That being said, when my daughter spent two years asking for a dog, and she happened to be the daughter that also takes care of our chickens and rabbit every single day without forgetting or without fail, well, I eventually said yes. And I love this dog. I adore her.
She is sweet, VERY smart, and the perfect size for a ‘not dog person’. (Not yappy-sized, and not ‘bigenoughtoknockyouover’ sized.) The only thing that was killing me was the poop. I spent a lot of time wondering if all dog owners were crazy. Do they all poop this much?
So my daughter set off to train her dog to poop in one place. There is a barked off area in the back of the yard between the garden and what we lovingly call ‘the sticky tree’ because this huge fir is always putting off pitch. The puppy took to using that space beautifully, but after a while, we realized it was the medium, not the spot, that she enjoyed using as her bathroom. That became a problem, because my entire garden is covered in the same bark. So now the whole side of the yard was free potty space, and she used it liberally.
Then, as I started planting the garden this spring, other things came up. She loves blood meal and egg shells. Both of which I use liberally as I am planting. She is also a whole foods lover, so she would eat my broccoli sprouts right to the ground, including the egg shells I had put around them to deter slugs.
All of a sudden, my dog was not nearly as charming as she was before planting started. In fact, I had dog-homicide on my mind regularly as I would go out into the garden and find that my pea seedlings had been trampled again, or she had taken down my trellis netting and it was now stuck on her collar as she drug it past my newly sprouted dill seeds, ripping them all from the ground… there were many instances like this and it wasn’t getting any prettier.
I set about making my space ‘dog free’. At first, it was a trial, because we were spending money, time and energy, but she could still get in there easily…
Super effective, eh?
We got gates and started to put them together. Considering the arbor and boxes are my own design and by no means ‘professional’ (or even square in some cases) this proved to be a bigger task than we thought but we figured it out.
Last week we got the last gate finished and the latches put on.
And now I love the view from this side of the fence.
It’s like having my own room outside. And the dog is back to being wonderful and delightful again.
Isn’t the view from the garden gate lovely?
1 comment
Lovely!
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