By Natalie Lester, PetSafe Brand Marketing Specialist
When I started researching pet-friendly gardens, I was surprised at just how much information was at my fingertips. Everything from how to protect your garden from your pet to creating Fido his very own green space flooded my search results.
I decided to combine them both and give you the five best practices to create a garden each of you can enjoy, but if you want more information you can find all the information I did here, here, and here. Trust me, it’s a lot of good stuff.
However, I’ve summarized it for you below. Get out in the yard between these April showers and start gardening for the May flowers.
1. Keep them safe: The last thing you want while you are cultivating your green thumb is to lose your furry friend. You don’t want to spend all your days gazing out the window to check on them, so build a fence to protect them or install a containment system to maintain your view. The containment system also allows you to restrict access to certain parts of the yard like a vegetable garden while letting them roam in others.
2. Give them room to run: As you’ve probably noticed through the years as a pet owner, your dog has tons of energy and loves to spend it running frivolously from one end of your yard to the other. Maybe they have a certain route they take, which may have been worn to a mere dirt road by now. Why not give them their own route through the garden? Build a path along their usual stretch so you can give them the racetrack of their dreams and still protect your shrubbery!
3. Preventing Digging: This can be a serious issue, especially if you spend countless hours in your yard pulling weeds, pruning and watering. After all, you care for your plants as much as you care for your pups. We’ve written great training techniques about how to fix this before (and here's another one), or you may want to consider giving your pet their own digging pit where they are allowed to dig until their heart is content.
4. Plant the right greenery: In an ideal world, we would be able to keep our previous plants out of our pet’s mouth but you and I both know that is hardly possible. Click here for the full list of plants to avoid.
5. Grant them access: No one, including your pets, can enjoy the garden if they can’t get to it. Make sure your pet can enjoy the garden as much as you do with a doggie door. Training and installation are easy and oh-so-worth it!
What gardening do you plan to do with your pet this season? What PetSafe product do you think would be most useful? Let us know in the comment section below to win the product you suggest.
ABOUT NATALIE As the PetSafe Brand Marketing Specialist, Natalie manages The Paw Print blog and generates other brand related content including public relations and promotions.
Before PetSafe, Natalie worked in the local media covering politics, education, and religion. Natalie’s puppy, Emma, spends almost as much time in the office as she does.
