Gardening with Dogs

Gardening is hard work.  Gratifying work, for the most part, but it’s not for the faint-hearted.  Gardening with dogs takes things to a whole new level.  My four, Bear, Sophie, Scout, and Carli, are what might be called Velcro dogs – where you are, that’s where they are.  One night a couple of weeks ago, all four managed to get into the bathroom with me.  I have a small bathroom, small enough that it was pretty crowded with me and four large dogs.  If I don’t let them in the bathroom, one or more of them lie on the floor just outside the door, waiting.  Sometimes they block the door and I have to shout at them to let me out.

So, it’s no surprise that they love to participate in all the gardening tasks.  Pulling weeds around the flower beds is a little difficult with a 60-pound collie lying right in the middle of the patch you are trying to weed.  Raking up debris means dodging dogs and preventing them from stealing the branches from the brush pile.  Sophie discovered in the spring that she can sit on the tarp we use to gather up brush and clippings and go for a ride across the yard.  And Scout demands to be petted every few minutes when you are sitting in the grass planting things or pulling up things.  Carli, who has amazing joie de vivre for life, busies herself finding things to play with, or bringing things out of the house to play with, or trying to get someone or something to play with her, or digging industriously for moles.  All four dogs are prodigious excavators.  If we could only get them to dig in the spots where we want the ground cultivated, we wouldn’t even need a plow.  I’ve seen Bear dig a hole big enough to hold him and one of the other dogs in just a few minutes.  And they can all make a trench following the trail of a mole underground.

The biggest problem in having the help of the dogs is preventing them from un-doing too much.  They don’t dig up plants very often unless they happen to be in the path of a mole, but early this spring, they pulled up and ate all the little bone meal spikes my cousin so carefully placed around the tomato plants.  He had worked on this project that morning and after he left at lunchtime, I happened to look out the window and saw Sophie and Carli walking down the row of tomatoes, pausing to pull something out of the ground and eat it.  “What in the world are you all doing,” I shouted out the window.  I find myself asking that question several times every day and throughout the night.  I really don’t so much want to know what they are doing as I just want them to stop doing it.  Sophie paused and looked at me, then moved on to the next tomato plant.  I realized what they were eating and went to fish the bag out of the trash.  The spikes were organic, so I decided they probably wouldn’t hurt them but I made them come inside before they made it all the way down every row.

Now that we are harvesting vegetables instead of planting them, the dogs are enjoying watching for groundhogs, rabbits, and armadillos. They excel at keeping deer and raccoons from ravaging the crops, sounding the alarm several times a night and dashing out the dog door to warn off intruders.  The one disconcerting thing they do when I am picking beans and tomatoes is that they will suddenly stare into the foliage, like a bird dog on the point, and I always wonder uneasily if it might be a snake. But I figure no snake with any ounce of self-preservation will stay anywhere around these dogs.  After all, they killed a bobcat earlier this summer – a snake would not intimidate them at all.

The dogs are very interested in all things about the garden, including what happens to the stuff after it leaves the garden.  The past two weeks, I have been working in corn.  Rising early, before the heat ramps up to furnace level, I wade through the corn patch, breaking off the ripe corn and depositing it in a basket.  From there, the corn goes to the picnic table under the big maple tree in the front yard, better known this time of year as the corn-shucking table. 

I could not even begin to guess how many thousands of ears of corn have been shucked in this spot over the years.  I can still picture my mom, and all the kids she kept in the summer, sitting on the benches pulling off the shucks and picking off the silks  while the dogs sat waiting for morsels of corn we would throw on the ground for them.  I don’t know about other dogs, but my dogs love corn, raw off the cob.  And the horses learned over the years to lurk near the fence, waiting for us to feed them the shucks after we were done.

The other day, I had picked a bunch of corn for the freezer.  While I was in the main patch, I checked out another two rows of a different variety of corn my cousin had planted for “late corn,” and realized that some of it was ready to pick.  I selected four or five ears and took them inside.  The phone rang and I lay the corn down in the living room, promptly forgetting all about it.  It stayed there all day and when I returned home from dinner with friends that night, I was greeted with the sight of corn, shucks and bare cobs scattered all over the living room floor.  Bear was chewing happily on a partially eaten ear and the other dogs were wagging their tails and smiling those Collie smiles.  “What have you all done?”  I asked, as if it was not obvious what they had done.  They had pulled those shucks off just as cleanly as I would and stripped the cobs of kernels just as bare as any hungry person would.  I had to laugh.  I wanted to blame Bear, but I suspected that everyone had a paw in the situation. That thought was borne out later that night when Carli came into the living room carrying a green tomato.  I took it away from her and a few minutes later she returned from the kitchen with a large pod of okra I had picked that morning.  If I could just teach them to go fetch the stuff from the garden on command, I could save myself some work. Maybe they could just plant their own garden.

 

 

 

 

Storm Symphony

 

We had quite a storm the other day.  I usually like to watch storms from the porch, but this one came up rather suddenly, while I was busy writing an article.  I have given up paying attention to the weather forecast – I can tell more than they can by just looking out the window.  When I’m writing I tend to ignore everything else, but I did notice the clouds gathering in the northwest and the particular stillness that sometimes comes just before the weather gets crazy.  I could tell that, in the Southern vernacular, it was coming up a bad storm.

Afterwards, I was thinking that storms, and especially this storm, are very much like the production of a symphony.  First were the clouds – the tune-up for the storm to come.  They blotted out the sun, swirled across the sky and changed from cottony white to swirling gray to ominous charcoal, dropping a curtain over the landscape.  The darkness deepened and the world held its breath.

Out of the darkness came the wind, growing in strength until it lashed the trees, whipping around the house and moaning in the chimney.  There is no sound quite like the wind in a chimney – it always puts me in mind of those gothic stories set on the moors of England. I said a prayer for the one remaining maple tree in my front yard, one of the trees that gave my farm its name more than a century ago.  My hope is that that tree will outlast me.  The others fell victim to another storm, years ago, and I don’t think my daddy, my mom or me ever quite got over it.  When storms like this one come, I am thankful for this sturdy house, whose walls have stood for more than a century and sheltered my family inside.

Thunder mumbled a warning and lightning danced across the sky. I stood at the window, the dogs stretched out in their customary spots around the room, unconcerned about the storm but content to be inside. The lights blinked once and it was my turn to hold my breath, wondering where the flashlight was, whether I could find the lighter for the candles and whether my cell phone was charged up.  But the lights steadied, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

The wind diminished and the rain came, buckets of water pouring down in sheets, pounding on the tin roof and dashing against the windows.  It came from all directions, blotting out my view of anything beyond a few feet. My poor hibiscus plant, which a few minutes before was standing so straight and proud, bent under the assault, the large pink blooms bowing their heads to the ground.  

A chair tumbled end over end across the yard and a flower pot crashed to the ground.  The wind chimes danced wildly, their music drowned out by the clamor of the rain.

Almost as abruptly as it arrived, the rain slacked off, like the last dying notes of music from an orchestra, and the clouds began to break apart, letting in streaks of blue sky.  I stepped on to the porch then, looking around for fallen trees and holding my breath until I saw that the corn in the garden was still upright.  The dogs came outside, yawning and stretching and relieved at the drop in temperature.  They were happy that a new assortment of large sticks was on the ground – a gift especially for them from whatever produced the storm that brought them down.  The grass seemed already a little greener, the birds more cheerful and Scout and Carli started a game of tug-o-war with a red towel they found on the porch.  Things were back to normal on Maple Shade Farm.

The Friendly Dark

 

The nighttime in summer is just about my favorite time to sit on my porch, listening to the insects and birds, watching the stars appear and seeing fireflies flicker across the yard. 

For years I drove home many a night from a horse show in the dark, and I don’t think I was ever afraid during those long weary trips.  Well, maybe a little nervous sometimes when the gas gauge was dipping a little too close to empty.   There was one midnight drive from Columbia when I forgot to stop for gas until I was past all the open stations, and I decided to chance it.   After all, I had a means of transportation in the trailer behind me, if worst came to worst.  Let’s just say things got a little tense about the time I passed the Shady Grove store.  I had certain touchstones on those trips – Bratton Lane, the long hill at Edgewood, the Swan Creek bridge (where some friends and I had a flat tire one night coming home from a horse show), and the hill where Swan Creek Road intersects.  I always breathed a sigh of relief when I topped that little rise and started down the hill to the radio station, knowing I was almost home. 

Horse shows at night have a special feel to them.  The lights make the show ring special and even the voice of the announcer and the music has a different sound at night.  Then there are the late night, sometimes very late, stops for a meal with horse show friends, while the horses rest and munch hay in the trailer.  Some of the most hilarious moments of my life have been spent at 2:00 in the morning at IHOP or Steak and Shake or Cracker Barrel, around two tables pushed together while we eat and remember and observe other customers.  You see some strange people at that time in those places, and I suppose we were among the strange sights – dirty, sweaty, punch drunk from excitement and weariness.  I can just hear them in their car after their meal.  “Did you see those folks over there laughing and acting all weird?”  Things are just funnier at 2:00 in the morning.

I was reminded of horse show trips a few weeks ago when I traveled to Shelbyville to do a story about a horse event there.  I left the house in the cool or the early morning, not at sunrise, but near enough to bring back memories of other trips that began at sunrise and sometimes ended well after sunset.  The biggest difference was that I was not pulling a horse trailer behind my truck and I didn’t have to pack up half my belongings the night before.

I have no idea how many horse shows I traveled to in those thirty years, and I have to say that writing the words “thirty years” startles me considerably.  In fact, I had to stop and count up the years again to be sure that was right.  But then I remembered that Bullet is 30 years old this year and I was already showing several years before he was born. 

 I would leave for those shows with a flutter in my stomach, from excitement, optimism and a little nerves.  Usually, about halfway there, I would remember something I forgot.  No matter how much stuff you pack, there is always something you forgot.  Some times were better than others; sometimes I started home with good ribbons and greater memories; sometimes I started home disappointed, frustrated and disheartened.  Sometimes I was just plain old mad.  But the odd thing was that always, usually about halfway home, I would start to plan what to do before the next time.  I would think about how I could improve our performance, how I could train or ride better, and usually I would realize that everything that went wrong was usually my fault.  The darkness gave me a focus – after all, there was nothing else to do except think and plan, and who can stay down when you’ve spent the day on horseback?

 

It’s been a while since I traveled from horse shows in the dark.  But I still like the dark. The other night I was in the swing, just at dusk, listening to the birds celebrate the end of another day, when, suddenly, everything stopped.  The birdsong trailed off, the frogs fell silent, even the insects stopped their noise.  I have never heard a silence so complete.  No cows lowing, no traffic on the nearby roads – just absolute total quiet.  It was eerie, like those horror movies where the woods fall silent when the monster is about to appear.  I glanced at the dogs, sprawled in various places on the porch.  They slept on, dreaming whatever dogs dream on a summer evening.  

The wind held its breath.  Then the dark came.  I don’t know if there was no moon or if the moon was simply invisible behind the clouds, but it was DARK. 

I have no recollection of what I was thinking about, there in the swing with just the dogs for company.  I don’t think I was planning or doing any heavy thinking.  Maybe it’s the closest I ever come to meditating. I lost track of time, there in the soothing darkness, because when I finally made my way inside, I realized it was almost bedtime and I had never thought to eat supper.