My Dog Grows Better Spinach Than I Do

(A lesson in working with dogs in the garden)

I think I have finally reached enough equilibrium between me, my garden and our two dogs that I can confidently write a post about it. While I focus on my dogs because that is where my personal experience has been, this is also a story about the process of working through a particularly difficult and demanding design problem in the garden.

But first, a word of advice for would-be-dog owners who are considering allowing a dog to enter your garden domain: get a really stupid, predictable, lazy dog. Anything else and you are in for spending a lot of time on either training or fencing, probably both. [simage=38,320,y,left]Unfortunately, I can’t follow my own advice on getting low maintenance dogs since I love dogs with energy and high intelligence. In our house we have a three year old female Jack Russell, Thandi and a one year old male Border Terrier, Sam.

The arrival of Sam last year was a mixed blessing. He brought a lot of energy and enthusiasm into the household mix and provided Thandi with a companion (i.e. someone to beat up), which greatly improved her mood and health. He also brought carnage and mayhem to our backyard with his eagerness to dig, a passion for knocking over any plant that stood in his way and a highly active brain, which, when combined with the ability to jump over 3′ vertically and strong jaws, meant that many of my cheaper DIY fence attempts and plant protection schemes failed miserably. As a result, many plants were harmed in the making of this post.

Sam’s persistence in destroying almost anything I tried to do started to bring out my dark side and caused a lot of tension between us. It got to the point that he was nervous about going outside with me because there would always be something he had destroyed and I would get mad yet again. Despite my best attempts to stay calm and a strong desire to be patient with him, I often could not keep the frustration from boiling to the surface. The situation was further complicated because dogs will not link correction or scolding that is happening now with an action that was done several minutes ago. So rather than learning not to damage plants and to stop digging everywhere, Sam learned that he should avoid me while I was looking at damaged plants and glaring at dirt holes.

One of the repeated lessons that life has been handing me lately is to look at the structural issues behind a conflict, so I began to view Sam as an indicator of design flaws and to observe more closely the interactions that my dogs have with the garden. The road to a more dog friendly design scheme was bumpy as my two furry quality engineers were very quick to exploit any weakness and make me pay for it. But with time, thoughtfulness, persistence and occasional ‘why me!?’ moments, things are starting to look better.

What changed?

I started closely observing my dogs habits and kept my eyes open for information on the instinctual behavior of dogs
We can learn so much by simply paying attention! I know it’s a novel concept, but from the overabundance of bad design that surrounds us, it is a very simple practice that we often fail to follow. My dogs instructed me on where they preferred to dig, what soil types, textures and moisture levels were most appealing to them. They taught me where they preferred to run and showed me that many interesting critters run along the fence and hang out in the corners of the yard. They want as much access to these places as possible. They also showed me that they prefer to run either directly through the lawn area or right along the fence. Any plants put in these pathways would be identified and destroyed immediately. Other plant free zones are the warmest spots in the yard. These are best reserved for dogs and not for plants. Any plants that attempt to make use of the sunning spots will find themselves quickly squashed and chewed on.

I trained where I could and designed structure into the garden where training was failing[simage=28,320,y,left]
There are some things you can train for, there are others that are just impossible to teach. One of my crowning achievements as a dog owner was training my dogs to stay out of the patio-side bed. There is only a three inch bamboo trim on the bed so there is nothing stopping them from jumping into it, but with patience I was able to train them to stay out of it. Amazingly they even respected the patio-side bed rules when we humans were not around to enforce them. However, just recently a new cat has moved in next door. This cat likes to sit on the fence by our patio. So in one fell swoop, she has destroyed months worth of training. The bed is in tatters, Sam has started digging in there and they both have trampled it relentlessly since the arrival of the cat. Which all goes to say, no matter how good of a trainer you are something will fail. In this case I have to surrender parts of that bed for cat access, anything else would be a huge battle between me and the dogs.

Another place where training failed was with the vegetable garden. I could NOT train them to stay out of there!! Sam particularly is obsessed with getting into the vegetable garden. He learned to stay out when we were home, but the minute we left the house he would find a way around my latest cheap fence attempt and would wreck something. So I finally had to build a three foot high fence which so far he has not jumped over, he can jump that high but I think he finds the fence intimidating so he hasn’t tried it yet (thank God).
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Despite the advice of various not-so-helpful online resources and books, Sam could not be taught to be satisfied with a “digging pit”. He would dig in his pit (or not) and then go on to dig in other, more interesting, places. This is further exacerbated by the fact that he mostly digs as an anxiety behavior when we are gone. Nor does it seem to matter how much we exercise him, in fact it seems that the better the exercise, the more vigorous the digging becomes once we leave the house. So, I noticed that he only really goes for bare earth, usually nice soft earth. He usually (not always!) avoids heavily mulched areas and areas that have plants covering the soil. So mulch, along with its other benefits, has also become a way to focus his digging away from certain areas. Of course when I freshly plant something, this is like throwing a big juicy bone out for him, so I have to protect fresh plantings either with heavy mulch or with some sort of encasement. [simage=34,320,y,none]

Waste not, want not
Our dogs will not dig where they poop. So, to turn that on its head, I would toss dog poop into any holes that they created and bury it. So, I am fertilizing and adding nutrients to the soil while at the same time discouraging a behavior that I don’t like. There are considerations that I have to think about with this approach. I take care to only do this away from edibles in order to avoid possible health problems. I think much of the information about human and animal waste is based on hype, bad design and misinformation, but it is probably better to be safe than sorry.

Gardener Dogs
Knowing that I cannot control their digging behavior (and boy have I tried!), I try to guide their movement through my yard, protect plants where I can but also acknowledge that ANY plant that is at their level is at risk. Rather than trying to protect everything, rather I have started to pick plants that can deal with root and foliage abuse, that work well in frequently disturbed environments and that grow quick and bushy. I have noticed that once plants get about the size of Sam, they start to respect it as part of the property and leave it (mostly) alone. A key in this is also using plants that are easily re-propagated at little or (preferably) no cost. One example in my garden is the use of California wild flowers which prefer to grow in recently disturbed or barren areas. They will reseed themselves, so if the dogs decide to dig in the wild flower bed, they are actually doing the wildflowers a favor. This experiment started late last fall and already Sam has been responsible for the establishment of a few seedlings.

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Go with the flow
The garden is beginning to flourish again because I have adapted my plant choices, built more dog friendly structures and layouts into the garden and built up strong barriers where necessary. The biggest lesson and blessing has been learning to work with my dogs rather than against them. It doesn’t hurt that Sam is moving out of puppyhood into dogdom, but even as mature dogs I have to respect their presence as forces and elements in our little backyard and household ecosystems. The results can sometimes be surprising. One of the darkest days between Sam and I was when he got into my box of seed packets and made a serious mess out of things. Granted, I was furious at first, but luckily most of my more treasured seed was untouched and the damage looked worse than it actually was. But now I had a pile of various seeds that had no packet to call home and that I could not positively identify. So I made “Sam’s Mix” and put it in the box with the rest of the seed packets. Later in the week Sam had been digging furiously in a certain area by the house, so I decided to try and toss some of his mix into that area and I laid a few bamboo poles down to discourage further aggressive digging. Miraculously he ignored it all, and the result has been some wonderful spinach that I am just now starting to harvest. I had tried to grow spinach in another part of the garden, but it has been struggling and tastes bitter. Sam’s spinach, however, is succulent, crunchy and growing vigorously.

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My hope is that I can allow myself the pleasure of encountering more of the joyful surprises that are out there, patiently laying in store as I learn to work towards fostering better habitat for ALL of our household and garden inhabitants.
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Below are a couple more pictures of ways that I have protected plants while respecting dog paths and flow patterns.

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