Dog Vs Garden: Meet the Fence

Never underestimate someone just because they have cute ears or flatter you with kisses

The biggest threats to our gardening efforts do not come from pests, but from those that snuggle up against my legs and keep me warm all winter long.  Yes, my pups may be my best friends, but they are not my garden’s best friends.

Over the last two years I have tried a variety of things to ward them off, with mediocre but up-till-now acceptable success.  I have mostly tried strategies that were low cost and low effort.  Someone suggested I try cayenne pepper sprinkled over the garden as a deterrent.  This might have worked out well, except that some accidentally got into my pup’s eye and it swelled shut for a day or so and I felt like the worst parent ever in the world. It was particularly depressing because it still didn’t keep him out of the garden.

When this failed, I finally decided to lay out a bit of cash and bought what we affectionately refer to as “the rock monster”, which is basically a battery operated invisible fence that keeps dogs away from its ten foot radius.  This worked well until the batteries died, but trained the dog to stay out of the garden until summer drought killed most things and a mini tall grass prairie sprung up and I didn’t care anymore if the dog ruined things or not.

Another idea I tried was my own special version “companion planting”.  I planted all my hot chili de aqua peppers around the outer edge of my garden in hopes that if my dog ventured in for a snack that he would have an unpleasant experience and never do it again.  This didn’t really have an effect.  My best plan was to plant multiples of everything as an insurance against canine catastrophe and hoped for the best. Yea, it wasn’t a great plan, but it was also pre-Cowboy involvement, and he has a way of improving my plans in ways I couldn’t previously imagine.

But this year there are now two dogs, which means like three times the destruction.  After all the effort to build trellises and defeat the weeds and our desire grow so many more items, we needed a better plan.  At first, I tried a liberal layer of cayenne pepper (with no puppy eyes harmed) but it didn’t stop either of them.  And we tried the rock monster, but only one could wear it at a time and it didn’t cover the whole garden.  So, after we lost a pepper and an eggplant to veggie loving pups within a few hours of planting, we decided we needed to break down and build a fence.  Not a pretty one, just an effective one, and as soon as possible.

Harley sits safely on the other side of the new garden fence from this beautiful marguerite daisy plant The Cowboy picked out that will hopefully attract more butterflies and fewer puppy dogs.

The Cowboy came by on his day off and built it with his bare hands with the help of his roommate. I think a t-post driver was also involved, but I am still pretty sure his hands were bare. He said that the project went much faster than anticipated and texted pictures that looked great. And it was only a one band aid necessary project (trellis building was a two band aid day).  I came home from work that night eager to see his handiwork, but was greeted by only one puppy face at the gate!! Someone was missing.  That someone was behind the garden fence sitting with the marigolds he had ripped off their stems.  Scandalous!

The Marigold Murderer investigating checking out his handiwork

So, the next day was fence building day part two, which has so far proved quite effective.  The Cowboy re-enforced the breached defenses, constructed a gate, and I happily planted some additional plant selections. 

So far we have had no more blue heeler break-ins, so we hope our harvest losses have been minimized. Hopefully we have outsmarted them.  Although, you never want to underestimate a blue heeler, not even the tiny adorable cuddly ones. 


What strategies have you used to keeping your homestead harmoniously co-existing?  Do you have any hilarious failures or wild success tips for keeping canines out of the compost?  I am all ears.

Puppy Mug Shot

Garden Goal: Save More Seeds

My whole initial gardening desire was born out of a heart connection to my grandmother. As long as I knew my grandma she had a garden, and it was not uncommon to find seeds from all kinds of fruits and vegetables wrapped in paper towels or towed in jars all over.  In fact it was one of the little comical quirks she had that made her so lovely.  She passed away in the spring of 2007 and as a way to honor her I wanted to cultivate her garden.  In a way, her garden itself is a family heirloom.

But, I will just be really honest with you, I am a bad gardener.  Really bad.  Like I am only successful if I grow plants that flourish when neglected kind of bad.  When anything I plant grows at all I am pretty ecstatic and don’t get too upset when things don’t work out because I, say, forgot to water them for three weeks during 115 degree summer.  I really love the idea of gardening, but the actual work of weeding and remembering to water and all of that cultivation stuff is hard for me.  But for a wide and ever evolving set of reasons, I continue to go at it. I have had a lot of failures, and it is a blessing that in spite of whatever hopes I have to one day be able to grow all my own food, I have not had to rely on my own garden to sustain me.  My grandmother’s generation pioneered the victory garden, and I have pioneered the failure garden.

I first really became interested in heirloom plants after that first gardening year without my grandmother when I planted and fell in love with a pepper and a tomato.  Love at first bite. The pepper, chili de agua, had an intensity somewhere between a poblano and a jalepeno, and the black cherry tomato, a sweet, dark, mellow fruit that I searched for at farmer’s market stands for years after.  Maybe it was the fact that this chili was absolutely perfect filleted on a summer burger, or that this tomato was different than the standard red cherry tomato you can buy in the store that caused me to want to seek out these particular varieties.  After a couple years of searching, I finally discovered the heirloom tomato farm from which I had originally encountered these plants at a garden fair and planted almost my entire garden full of tomatoes, peppers, and some herbs.  I would have been swimming in salsa if it had not been the hottest driest summer in Oklahoma in decades.

This year I really wanted to save seeds and ensure I never was without my beloved chili pepper and tomato plants so I began to research heirlooms.  The more I learned, the more I felt like it was something I wanted to support beyond just my tomato obsession. It is true; you can’t walk into a grocery store and find these particular varieties of vegetable and fruit.  In fact, where I live, the selection of produce is so ordinary that trying to eat healthy can get really boring.  There is something in my spirit that says, it is good to grow these plants because they are different.  It is important to grow these plants because that means that they will continue to be enjoyed. And so, soap boxes about our nation’s food systems aside, I just want to continue to enjoy these plants, and that has led me to where I am today, learning about heirloom seed saving.

According to seedsave.org, vegetables that produce seed the same season as planted and are mostly self-pollinating are the ideal varieties for beginner seed saving gardeners to try.  Beans, lettuce, peas, peppers, and tomatoes are all excellent types to try if you are just starting out.  I actually happen to be trying to grow all of these veggies this year. YAY!

I took my Cowboy and we went to the store looking for heirloom seeds and much to my dismay no packages said “we are heirlooms”.  My sweet supportive Cowboy helped me pour over seed racks in a variety of stores checking the backs of packages and trying to figure out which of these seeds would satisfy me. Talk about an obstacle, all I wanted to do was grow some heirlooms and I couldn’t even find the dang seeds. After driving all over town, and feeling quite discouraged, I consulted the internet for some knowledge (which if I had done in the first place would have saved me a lot of trouble, I know, but that is not how impulsive go-getters do their gettin’).

I discovered several key facts:

• If it does not say “FI Hybrid” it’s open pollinated.
• ALL Heirlooms are open pollinated. Not all open pollinated seeds are Heirlooms.

Ok, that cleared up a LOT of questions in my mind when I was standing in the seed aisle of Home Depot, but regardless of the Hybrid versus Open Pollinated seeds; I still had a big question of how to acquire open pollinated heirloom seeds.  Oh thank Internet for being oh-so-made for these types of dilemmas.

And very importantly, I also confirmed that the seeds that I thought were heirlooms that I got from Seed Savers Exchange at Whole Foods ARE heirlooms! seedsavers.org This was the best news of all, since I already had some of these seeds, and I could easily get more.

In this process I also learned that for my small backyard garden, heirloom tomato seed saving might not be practical since I intend to plant several varieties of plants in a small space.  The seeds I “save” and am growing this year I actually saved from some tomatoes I bought at Whole Foods on sale to eat because the drought last summer was so rough on my tomato crop that I barely got any fruit.  However, I did come across a great resource, seedsave.org  which had a ton of practical and well organized information and instructions for saving the seeds of different types of vegetables. Book marked!  A book that I came across during my research called Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth is going to go on my wish list so that I can really educate myself on this stuff.  Seed saving has been like most things in my life where I just follow my gut first and then learn for to actually do it later.

After all this internet reading, my conclusion is that if I want to do this, I need to focus on choosing heirloom seeds to grow, collecting heirloom seeds for the future from reputable sources, and when I am only growing one variety of a plant that won’t cross pollinate, then saving the seeds.  So this unfortunately rules out saving my tomato seeds (and tomatillos because they are similar to tomatoes), because I intend to grow several varieties.  However, I am planning on a couple of other plants for which I will only plant one type and for those I can save the seeds. 

Plants with seeds I want to save:

• Pepper, chili de agua
• Pepper, green bell (I am growing this on the other side of the yard, so I think it will be ok)
• Peas
• Beans (apparently beans are super difficult to cross pollinate because of the way the flower is formed, I did not know!)
• Squash
• Okra
• Nasturtium
• Marigold
• Garlic (garlic grows basically wild in my garden, thanks to my awesome grandmother, so I put it on this list but it does not require much work from me)

My bench mark for success in this goal will be met if I save even just a handful more seeds this year, plant them next spring, and I start to educate myself about the science of seed saving and cultivation of heirloom plants.  Seriously, success will taste like putting that first chili pepper on my burger this summer and thinking about how it came from a seed from a pepper I grew last year. I might even do the awesome dance.