Dale,

I am truly sorry to hear that man's best friend sort of went nuts and failed to mind his manners. I hope you get some more melons and tomatoes from those plants.

There must be something about canines and melons, because here in the boondocks, coyotes devour melons like mad and don't even wait for the melons to get close to being ripe. Fred has lost practically all his melons at the old home place to coyotes the last few years, and he used to plant dozens and dozens of plants. I think he's given up on raising melons out there any more, and it is a shame because the old home place has great sandy soil along the Red River.

Most of my dogs don't eat tomatoes, but they're fenced out of the garden anyway. Since we have hard clay soil, they can't dig under the fence although they certainly have run amok in the garden when I have forgotten and left the gate open. (A mistake you only make a couple of times before you learn that your garden pays the price for a gate left open.)

Do you think your dog was playing or was thirsty? Maybe he or she had knocked over the water dish and sought out the fruit for the water content? Maybe the dog wanted to play ball? My dogs grow their own gourds and pumpkins on the dogyard fence and randomly pull them and play with them whenever the mood strikes, so they don't necessarily get a lot of gourds or pumpkins to full maturity, but they have fun.

The stink bugs are atrocious this year. Between them and the grasshoppers, it is a wonder I have a garden left. I haven't had SVBs this year, but have squash bugs, the aforementioned stink bugs (they arrived in May again which is abnormally early), and leaf-footed bugs.

You know, pelting the dog with tomatoes might not be a bad idea. Here in our area, when a country dog kills a family chicken, some people tie the dead chicken carcass to the dog's collar and leave it there a couple of days so the dog has to smell that decaying corpse. They claim it teaches the dog a lesson, but uggh, I don't think I could do it. Luckily, our dogs aren't bird killers.

Every year we have different gardening challenges, and some years are more challenging than others. You still have plenty of time to get lots more tomatoes and other veggies since the average frost date for your area is....what....about early November?

Every winter, I start out the year with such high hopes for the garden, and then it is always a struggle all spring and summer to try to make the dream a reality. If it isn't the weather, it is the pests, or the deer or the rabbits or.....whatever disease is most active that year. What keeps us all going? Probably that old saying "there's always next year".

Since we've lived here, every animal known to mankind has attempted to destroy my garden, though thankfully not all in the same year. As soon as I figure out how to exclude one type of wildlife, another one figures out how to get into the garden. I've seen animals in/around my garden that I never knew existed....until we moved here, I didn't know that there was such a thing as a ring-tailed cat. (That particular wild critter likes to eat our young poultry.) I'd never expected to have a beaver killing our trees, or a cougar hanging out at the edge of the garden, or skunks digging up sunflowers or turtles eating tomatoes. It is always something......and I didn't know that deer ignore those lists of "plants that deer won't eat" and eat them anyway.

Recently, I noticed 1 lone pigweed plant in the corner of the potato bed. I kept meaning to dig it up or cut it down---seems like it zoomed from 6" tall to 5' tall in about a week.....but before I got around to it, a deer ate it. Ha! At least the deer are good for something. I think I grew okra here for 5 years before I ever got a pod because the deer would jump the then-three-foot-tall garden fence and eat every plant down to the ground at some point during the season.

All that's ever worked for me is the 7' tall fence we have now, and it only works if I remember to always close both gates. One reason I haven't expanded the garden more and more every year is because it means moving the 7' tall fence or errecting another one.

I have friends who garden in towns, both large cities and small towns, and they often find fruit missing from their plants, or sometimes entire plants gone, and believe it is two-legged critters stealing their fruit and veggies, flowers and herbs. So, I guess a garden is never truly 'safe'.

Hopefully the second half of this gardening year will turn out better than the first. Or, as I always say, there's always next year.....

Dawn

Chef - Sorry about your garden.

Dawn - No wonder you get so much done. You don't ever sleep.

Dale,

One of my dogs is half-dog, half-pig.

This is why I fenced my garden this year with chicken wire. Last year, she feasted on berries, tomatoes, plums that had fallen...she even ate my asparagus shoots as soon as they peeped out of the ground!

I FEEL your pain.

Jo

Dale, I am sorry about your garden. We have a little yorkie that loves squash, not the fruit, but the leaves.
I just let him eat all he wants. My plants have little hunks missing around the edges of the leaves. Now if I can get him to eat the vine bores and squash bugs he can really earn his keep.

Larry

Dale,
I feel your frustration, but I do have to admit that your story made me laugh. We have a dog that would clean out the garden if he had half a chance. He's a notorious food thief and we think it's because he was a stray for a while before we adopted him, so he had to scrounge whatever he could find to survive. To this day we have to be very careful about setting food down anywhere he can reach, including the kitchen counters, because he is a confirmed counter surfer. He's stolen hamburgers, danish, pizza, and once he ate an entire loaf of Amish friendship bread. Just the other night he helped himself to leftover chicken and pasta from dinner. I do feel your pain.

Suzie

Oh, Dale, I feel your pain. Sorry.

We fenced the garden and got a dog to keep away the wild critters. Then refenced the garden to keep the dog away from the garden. LOL If he's not eating the veggies, he's sitting on them with his big, ol' hairy butt.

Diane

Thanks, guys. Better than a big ol' hairy butt is my perspective for the day.

Dale OKC

Oh, I forgot to add that time that he ate my glasses, and then the time that he ate the pine cone when we were camping in the Tetons. After we got home he became very, very ill. Took him to the vet, who finally had to operate on him. The vet removed a pine cone from his gut, a couple of inches below his stomach. Really .... a pine cone!!! Imagine how that must have felt doing down!

Suzie

LOL- this stories not from the garden (what I'm sure she would if she could). Suzie's story about her glasses and the pine cone made me think of my sister's dog.

Yarn. Imagine coming home to a dog much longer on both ends.