How To Landscape A Dog-Friendly Garden?

If you have a dog and also like to develop a fruit or flower garden, it may be a real challenge for you because dogs in general, are hostile to a garden. But if you landscape your garden in a dog-friendly manner, you have the amenable company of both.

But depending upon the topography of your proposed garden, your first consideration should be the cost of cleaning land for proper landscaping.

Why Landscaping?

This is the first step toward making your dream garden, a reality. It involves planning, designing, cleaning, paving, and planting. But dogs are notorious and need freedom of movement, attention, and many other canine needs.

Therefore, you need to take certain special and exclusive measures for making your garden dog-friendly. Below are a few tips in this regard.

Dog Friendly Landscaping Tips

1. Path for Running and Patrolling

If you have a Labrador, you know that it is a high-energy breed, meant for physically demanding work such as running, hiking and retrieving, etc.

A Labrador needs proper exercise for stimulating its mind and for keeping its weight under control. Therefore, your garden should have three feet of the fence for a perimeter path for your Labrador.

In case, your dog is a Houdini that can make a tunnel under the fence and escape; you have to make an underground barrier, out of the chicken bar, rebar or poured concrete.

2. Canine Toilet

Specifically, leave a space in the corner of your yard, so that your dog can relieve itself of nature’s call. Train it up for using that particular area.

Cover the area with materials that, you can clean. You can use gravel, or cedar chips. For a male dog, you can put a marking post for urinating and marking its territory.

3. Shady Shelter

You may be aware that dogs sleep a lot. While an adult dog sleeps 12 to 14 hours a day, a puppy sleeps for more than 18 hours a day.

After 10 minutes of sleeping, the dog enters the stage of Rapid Eye Movement (REM). While its eyes roll under its closed lids, it may whine, bark, or can jerk its legs.

Older dogs sleep for more than 20 hours a day. Long time slumber is a dog’s birthright. Therefore, give them a deck or patch of lawn for enjoying their birthright and also their favorite, sun-bathing.

4. Plant Densely

Dogs will like to keep them away from the brushing and pinching of the plants if you plant densely. Put the plants on raised beds and put a fence temporarily around the newly landscaped areas. After removing the temporary fencing, put some rock borders in its place as a mark of reminder.

For dense planting, you may choose thickly grown shrubs and ornamental grasses that remain green throughout. Putting brittle plants such as salvias in the center will keep them well-protected.

5. Pick Power Materials

Put paw-friendly paving materials like splinter-free bark mulch and flagstone. Put a layer of bark mulch decomposed granite and keep the unplanted area, weed-free. Your dogs can play freely there, without invading the plants in your garden.

6. Provide the Holistic Canine Needs

If your dogs are comfortable and non-invading in your garden, you can enjoy a dog-friendly garden. Therefore, everything that dogs of different breeds need.

These are; a running track, non-interfering plants, border control, comfy mulch, and of course driftwood as a marking post.

7. Provide Access to Water

Keep provision of clean drinking water in a clean container and see that it always contains water so that whenever your dog feels thirsty, it can drink water without going here and there, in search of it. It should be placed in a cool and safe place.

8. Make the Surfaces Dog-Friendly

If the dogs walk through the garden, they will crush and damage the plants. Therefore, make comfortable pavers with pea gravel. Ensure that no sharp edges are put on the paper; otherwise, the dogs will stay away and damage your garden.

9. Create Comfort Zones

When your dog finds a squirrel or a mongoose inside your garden, it will run after it, till it is driven away from the garden. In this process, the dog gets exhausted and likes to a have comfort zone where it can lie down and recover from its exhaustion.

10. Make a Mini Dog Park

‘Park inside the garden’ will be a matter of great fun and amazement for your dog and will become a real friend of your garden. Leave a designated space for your dogs where they can play with their friends, without causing the least damage to your garden.

11. Resign Yourself

Dogs mark their territory by urinating on a post or protruding areas. If you find your dogs marking on plants or grass, then make use of a hose for flooding the area.

Since both your garden and dogs are equally important for you, you cannot afford to sacrifice one for the other. Your best option will be to make both, friendly by adopting the above tips.

Author Bio

Emily Taylor has a huge passion for gardening with the urge to know and control every little thing that happens inside her house. When she isn’t glued to her backyard or caring for the house, she spends time writing her blog Lovebackyard.com hoping to share her tips and stories with people who want to transform their house into a real paradise. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter at @Emily_Taylor9.

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