What’s running wild through the backyard? It’s the Garden Godzilla
Published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle Oct. 21, 2022
By Barb Gorges
It has been a tough growing season.
By the end of August, Cheyenne was behind in precipitation by 5 inches – of an average 10-15 inches per year. The upside was we got very little hail.
The downside is that without rain to even out our irrigation attempts, a lot of plants are suffering – most noticeably trees. Young trees turned their fall colors early or died. Top branches of old trees died. Please water your trees on warm days in fall and winter too.
People in my neighborhood who don’t water their lawns because their landlord doesn’t offer an incentive or they are unable to, grew fine crops of thistle and other invasive plants. I look at the thistle as a portent of things to come if we don’t get enough snow in the mountains and water rationing becomes severe.
But right now, Godzilla is trashing my yard.
It isn’t the drought. Its real name is Bailey and she is a Golden Retriever puppy Mark and I brought home at 8 weeks old at the beginning of September.
Our Midcentury Modern house came with a backyard enclosed by a 4- to 5-foot-high wall of pink concrete blocks so we don’t have trouble with rabbits. But two dogs ago, we fenced off the shrubs with 3-foot-high wire fencing and the flower and herb beds with fencing that is 2 feet tall. As our last dog became elderly and less interested in rampaging, and finally died this spring at 16, we took down the flower and herb bed fencing.
September 2 or 3, the 2-foot fencing went back up around the herb bed and the flower bed. We’d planted more shrubs with no fencing several years ago, but by September 10, Mark had 3-foot fencing up to keep Bailey from gnawing branches.
Bailey loves the echinacea on the front edge of the flower bed. By throwing herself on the fencing, at first held up between the steel corner posts only by a few green plastic-coated sticks of rebar, she could get the leaves to pop through the mesh of the fence and eat them. Echinacea has medicinal uses – is it the leaves? And then, on September 24, she started climbing over the fence. Mark bought and installed a roll of 3-foot-high fencing.
Good fences make good neighbors and better puppies. But the garden and shrubs aren’t the only parts of the backyard getting trashed. Bailey is eating holes in the lawn. I think she might be a truffle hunter.
Our previous Golden, Sally, nibbled little white mushrooms in our lawn without ill effect though we removed any we found first. There is this swathe of dark green that seems to harbor mushroom-growing abilities the rest of the yard doesn’t have. Bailey is smelling something and rooting out grass clumps. She’s also rooting out the new grass that Mark painstakingly grew this season wherever Sally burned holes.
Puppies chew in the house too. We pulled out our 30-year-old tube of Grannick’s Bitter Apple paste and applied it to various edges of lower kitchen cabinets, and I started looking for more. Petco couldn’t find theirs and Walmart only had 35-ounce spray bottles of bitter cherry, no apple. But our vet tech said cherry worked very well for her dog.
I thought maybe I could spray those holes in the grass that Bailey is intent on enlarging. But before I could try that, I sprayed my toes to protect them while I washed dishes. It kind of worked. Bailey stopped nipping and started licking my toes instead. Guess I’ll try ordering Grannick’s bitter apple.
Mary Sharp gave me a tour of her flower beds recently, and like other country gardens, most are enclosed with deer fencing. Some areas, like the vegetable garden that needs frequent attention, have a gate. Along the new berm, and a few other beds, there’s no fencing because the plants don’t appeal to Bambi and his herd. So far, there is no plant that doesn’t appeal to Bailey.
The good news is that puppyhood doesn’t last forever. But until Bailey grows an eight-hour bladder, I am the one getting up with her between 2 and 4 a.m. I gather the sleepy puppy in my arms and take her out to the backyard, stepping onto the cool grass barefoot. I set her down and she becomes a pale shape in the not-very-dark night. Through the leaves of the green ash tree, I can see the brightest constellations. On the warmest nights I hear the crickets [late September]. If I don’t get too lost in reverie, Bailey doesn’t wake up enough to get into mayhem. She comes when I call and we tiptoe back into the sleeping household.
Cheyenne Garden Gossip 