How to keep dogs out of flower beds

No matter how much you love your dog, you don’t want him or her rooting around in your flower gardens. The digging can destroy your beautiful blooms, plus create a big mess. But you can prevent dogs from rooting around in your flower beds by employing one of the following five methods.

Install flower bed fencing in order to prevent dogs from entering your garden. Or, create a temporary barrier out of chicken wire. Drive a few stakes into the ground around your flower beds, then wrap the chicken wire around the stakes. When you don’t want the wire visible, roll it up and remove it.

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Dogs often dig due to boredom. To prevent your pet from heading to your flower beds for some fun, create a play zone all their own. Dig out a shallow area in your yard, then fill it with sand and some dog toys. This dog-friendly landscaped play area should be much more enticing than your flower beds.

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Dogs don’t like spicy or bitter flavours, so mix up a homemade repellent using these flavours and sprinkle it on your flower beds. An easy spicy dog repellent includes equal parts of red pepper and powdered mustard. For a bitter dog repellent, dissolve bitter orange, an essential oil used as a flavouring agent, on spent coffee grounds. Bonus: The coffee grounds also help fertilise your garden.

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Not surprisingly, dogs don’t like to get poked. Save all of your prickly clippings, such as those from rose bushes, hawthorns or barberries, and toss around the edges of your flower beds. If you don’t like the “rustic” look of branches strewn about, tuck the branches under the bottom leaves of your flowers.

In the same way you can teach a dog to sit and roll over, you can also teach them to stay away from your flower beds. It takes some time and consistent reinforcement, but once your dog learns that your flower beds are off-limits, you should never have problems again.

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Source: Family Handyman