Puppies On the Farm

Total Mayhem or the Perfect Companions, only Time will Tell...

I am fully willing to admit that I was over-ambitious in taking on two puppies at the same time. They didn't both come at once, but two months apart. Still, comparing the idea of two puppies to the memory of the near-perfect dog that passed too soon relative to the 12-year older self since the last time I trained a puppy. Well, shame on me.

“Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.” -- Franklin P. Jones

The potty training and the sleeping through the night went great. Those, I knew how to do really well. The puppies did really well, but each came with their own distinct personality. One, a bruising Valkyrie that thinks she is a lap dog (almost 60 lbs. at 6 months), the other a total charmer--as long as you don't ask anything of him, like wipe his paws.

Dogs Love to Dig Holes

And I'm totally okay with this. Our last dog was a digger but an incredibly lazy one. You couldn't let him take a toy outside unless you wanted a huge mulch pile up against the foundation. It was funny.

My Valkyrie, on the other hand, seems to have a sixth sense for voles and anything else that could be potentially dead or rotten. At three months, she dug up a dead vole out of the lawn, followed by one in the planting rows (the verdict is still out on whether that one was alive or dead). She has it bad for the roots around the Korean lilac and she is merciless with the Siberian iris, both of which I can assure you are innocent. Then there were the grass plugs that I had tried to overwinter in some of the rows. She would leap across a row, grabbing the tips of each grass with a grin whereby a chase would ensue. I decided it would be easier to start new seed or buy new plug trays.

So what happens when I transplant thousands of plugs this spring? Critterfence arrived today because while the training continues, there is still no trust. They will continue to dig out the pea gravel in the greenhouse, but that is a compromise I can live with for now.

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#Irishdoodle #Flowerfarm #holediggers # critterfence #ephemeralfarm