AD – This is a collaborative post
We love our Buster. We really do. Since he came to live with us back in October, he has brought us a lot of smiles and a lot of happiness. He has however, brought us a lot of trouble just like most dogs do! One of those things is his digging. He is a digger. And when he digs, he digs. There won’t be a hole in the ground and then he has a little tap tap with those paws, and then very quickly gets them right into it and there is suddenly mud flying everywhere and a ruddy great hole in the ground. You know that scene in the second (original) Jurassic Park where Julianne Moore, and Jeff Goldblum’s daughter, are trying to dig themselves under a door and on the other side, a raptor is trying to dig its way in? Buster reminds me of the raptor! So much so that we have questioned whether he is part raptor!
From all of this digging, the garden very quickly got wrecked. It hasn’t helped at all that up until now, the weather has been very, very wet and so the garden has been very easy to dig. But there were holes everywhere and they were really deep. We gave him his own digging area under the trampoline where he proceeded to very quickly dig a hole that he could fit his entire body into, but it just didn’t stop him from digging elsewhere.
We knew we had to fix it, but needed some dry weather, and thankfully this weekend brought just that. We had the soil at the ready, and the other half had also got some chicken wire to lay over the fresh soil so that Buster didn’t just go straight over and dig it all up again.
And on Saturday, we told the boys that they could help us fix the holes.
The first thing the other half did was take down the trampoline. It was wrecked from massive overuse, too small for both of them now, and a bit of an eyesore. They agreed that it was fine to get rid of, so he took it all apart. Once that was out of the way, it was time to fill the holes in. There were about 5 or 6 in total and the boys had the job of emptying the soil out and filling them in. They thought it was brilliant! I mean why wouldn’t they – it meant getting their hands covered in mud! They did a fabulous job and soon the ground was all even again – more muddy than grassy, but even!
After this job, the other half covered the freshly laid soil with chicken wire flat to the ground. We weren’t sure whether this would work but it seems to have done so far. He then used a few of the metal stands from the trampoline to section off Buster’s digging area, in the hope that we could encourage him to once again use that area instead of the rest of the garden. It doesn’t get much sunlight so nothing really grows there, so it makes sense to let him have a ‘play area’.
I was super impressed with how well it all turned out. The other half sprinkled a load of grass seeds over the ground so hopefully that will grow and we will back to having a nice lawn for the Summer months again. Unless of course he just digs it all back up again! At which point I will just get some imitation grass and be done with it!