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.