Landscaping with dogs and other concerns

Hi all. I've been living in my lower michigan tiny ranch home for about 3 years now. When I moved in, my yard was all shade. The lady before me did very simple and tidy shade loving plants - boring to me.

Once I took out a couple dead trees, I get a lot of sun all day long in front and in back which is great because I love flowers and color. I like to keep fresh cut flowers at work and in the house as much as possible.

Here's the rub: 1) I'm a total newbie to lanscaping, 2) I have 3 active herding dogs and am fostering 2. 3) due to the dogs, my back yard is mostly dirt, some grass and a lot of yellow burn stains.

My thought is to create new flower beds in the back, using up some of the grass and dirt areas. Place pea stone in the pathways (areas where the dogs have worn to dirt). I'm not sure how this will work, but asdie from laying an all concrete lawn, I'm not sure what to do. Does anyone have dog friendly landscaping ideas for a small yard (65w x 120 l). The yard still needs to be functional as we play frisbee and they play chase.

Next, I have a lot of roses. Some of the roses are doing really well. A couple others (josephs coat for example) is being eaten by something. It is not a skeletal looking damage, more like something is eating the leaf from the outside in. What pest would this be? I have not seen too much around.

For rose treatment, I worry about poisoning the dogs (or cat) and even the birds that eat out of the feeders and off the ground, bugs, etc.
Any thoughts on that?

Thanks for reading!

Julie

I have two great danes who run a LOT! Occaisonally, they dig and all the plants and sign posts get mixed up. Seems to happen the most in the hosta beds as they are in the shade, get the most extra watering, and thus more moles. I believe it is the moles that they are after. I don't think this is your problem. Other than this issue, we have been able to keep the girls out of hte beds using wattles. I use crepe murtle branches are arch them around the paths. Here is a pic of Hera (the harlequin) and Princess (the black one)

It sounds like your dogs are "herding" the edge of the property. I say LET them. You won't be able to stop them. Come in from their path and create your beds and create borders, either some similiar wattle idea like I stated above, or something else as creative. If you have access to local stones, you may want to create raised beds with stone borders, maybe only a foot tall. I have found the more paths I give the girls, the more they use them. These edge beds will still keep a center portion of green lawn in the center for frisbee, etc.


As for your roses, I have no help. I don't have any.

Good luck

Here is a pic of the hosta bed. you can see a path that leads to the right from the driveway to teh fence and back around. we have these paths all through the beds that line that back yard.

Good luck

I had willow branches like that and my pup pulled them up thinking they were sticks he could chew on.

I had to surround my new garden with chicken wire, it's 3 1/2' high but I recently saw him jump it...so need to go higher. Here's Wall-e.
I too need to find some more(hopefully attractive) ways to keep him out of the gardens, or until he gets older just keep my gardens in the front yard on the other side of our fence.

Julie, I have 2 dalmatians and a poodle. Before the dals I only had small dogs which didn't create much of a problem. Then came the girls and the dirt pathways, mud in the house, flowers pulled up (the youngest when she was a baby), I could go on and on. I agree with TexasLizzy about bringing the beds out. What I did was I brought in gravel and made pathways around the property which was just a little wider than yours. I also made a gravel pathway from the front to the back door. This gives them the feelings that they are guarding the property plus it helps to keep their feet clean. This was 12 years ago and some of the gravel has worn down. I did and do have to keep up with the weeds and it was alot of work but not very costly. I don't put up fences around any of the beds and yes they do get into them, oh well it's also their yard. The one thing I did find, by mistake was when I covered one the beds with black plastic last year they stayed out of it. I think the plastic either gets to hot or they don't like the sound. I hope this helps.

DDDAL

Ah! What a great idea. Bring the landscaping away from the fence and create paths. Thanks for the pictures.

I buried banana peels the other day for the rose bushes. The dogs hopped the anti-dog fencing and dug them up as soon as I turned my back. Little buggers. I guess the front roses will only be getting banana peels from now on.