This dog is a natural gardener. She loves chasing critters off of my tomato plants.

My Dog Gardens + Podcast

Posted on by da-AL
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zQMEv0QpLhyyOl41Ain5w?si=8e0d87229619455f
Photo of K-D doggie watching over pests in the garden.
K-D girlie is a natural gardener.

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What do medium-to-large-sized dogs have to do with gardening?

My gardening skills lie within the black-thumb spectrum, but they’ve improved drastically, thanks to canine assistance! I gladly shared the bounty with Los Angeles’ urban wildlife — but I drew the line when birds and rats didn’t leave anything for my family.

The dogs I’ve cared for greet fertilizer as candy, so I barely use it. Nor do I use pesticides for that, and myriad environmental reasons. All 3 of the wonder doggies I’ve had (a still-missed brother and sister, and now K-D girlie) have helped chase away vermin! K-D challenges everything from squirrels, mice, and rats, to possums, raccoons, and coyotes. Birds, too, get barked at enough to leave off nibbling more than a little of the tasty fruit and veggies.

That’s not all. Once I added dogs to our household, the hoards of snails dwindled. Ditto for legions of jumbo grasshoppers. Fortunately, beneficials such as ladybugs and pollinating non-aggressive bees and wasps aren’t bothered.

Pretty green flying beetles used to ruin the figs before they got a chance to ripen. With a dog or more to lunge and chomp at them, they’ve flow elsewhere. By the way, keeping grass short and clearing leaves also reduces fig beetles.

I’m on my own when it comes to spiders, the ones that stunted many tomato plants with their desiccating webs of red powder. Another tip: watering tomato plants only at their roots staves off mold and some bugs.

Photo of how a window screen wrapped around a tomato plant keeps off critters.
Screens keep the good in and the bad out.
Photo of how clothes pins secure flexible window screen material at base of plants.
Along with dogs, window screen and clothes pins protect plants.

Wait — back to birds and squirrels — some were extra persistent. Finally, using leftover window screen material did the trick.

Photo of a wasp working to get under a tomato plant cage.
Wasps and bees are garden helpers too. Don’t bee fooled by the wasp in this photo — pollinators such as this one and bees squeeze under mesh to work their magic.

Voila! It lets in sunlight and air. Plus it’s light enough to snip with scissors, then wrap around plants. Clothes pins keep the malleable cages snug.

Photo of 3 fresh ripe tomatoes on a piece of window screen.
Gardening goodness, screen guardian underneath.

Sure, home-grown tomatoes surpass grocery store ones. Gardening teaches me to be resourceful and optimistic. It’s also shown me that dogs are more amazing that I thought!

Is your pet a gardener?

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Published by da-AL

Happiness Between Tails speaks to and from the heart. It connects lovers — of pets, authors, books — and of my still-unreleased novels, “Flamenco + the Sitting Cat” and “Tango + the Sitting Cat.” The stories are my love letters to all who fear they're too odd, too damaged, too old, too whatever to find happiness. ContactdaAL@gmail.com • BuyMeACoffee.com/SupportHBT

53 thoughts on “My Dog Gardens + Podcast”

  3. My mom was a gardener, D-Al – me, not so much. I do a lot of watering and I have outside help with weeding and other maintenance. Cats, sadly, don’t do any thing they don’t want to so there’s no help from that direction. 😀🌻

    Liked by 2 people

  5. My cat used to catch the big icky flies that sit on dead animals, but otherwise he was useless in the garden. 🙂
    Your tomatoes look delicious!!! I used to grow mine in a greenhouse, but here I don’t have any, so I just sowed some seeds in a pot and they are bringing forth some nice littel fruits. They are cherry tomatoes. I also tried some bell peppers again, they are flowering now; we will see if they can make it to grow into peppers.
    Our birds eat some of the raspberries, but I let them, we get so many. I wish they would eat more of the mosquitos though! We don’t have hornets this year that usual did the job and killed the big wasps and other small insects, but not bees and bumblebees.
    We have a hedgehog that eats all the fallen mirabelles, which is nice as well. Live and let live …

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    1. Mirabelles. Pretty name. I think they are what we call plums. The other day I watched a documentary on bats. They are amazing with bugs but I’m not sure if the neighbors would approve nor would I be any good with them 😝

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      1. Mirabelles are a kind of plum, but small and round, mostly golden yellow, but there are also red ones. Our neighbour has just felled all the huge trees, so if there had been bats, they are gone now. I don’t mind bats, they usually keep to themselves. And they don’t make any noise like crows for example.

        Liked by 2 people

            1. Interesting. Today Los Angeles Times featured big article on how we need bats to help farmers keep off bugs and that fear of rabies is overblown. No foxes or deer in the city. Plenty of coyotes though haven’t heard them blamed for rabies

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