"Dog-proofing Your Yard"

"Dog-proofing Your Yard" was a topic on one of the Portland morning news shows this morning. My husband wanted me to watch, but I already had a date to go walking with my friend Janae (who I only have 20 days to socialize with before she moves to Utah.) Our dogs have been VERY BAD for the part of our back yard where the grass should be:
(Yes, that's YARN in the picture)

However, dogs are VERY GOOD for flowers. I don't think I lost a single tulip bulb to squirrels this year. There won't be any deer eating my vegetation with Cozy and Callie around (I saw a doe a block from the house once, so it's not entirely impossible.) Neighbors are not helping themselves to my roses (Mo Jackson had a good story about that on her blog.) And my flowerpots are safe from crazy ladies planning to open their own garden centers with purloined pots and yard art (true story, I lost several of my best containers a couple of years ago to just such a lady, there was a story about her in our newspaper a few weeks after they went missing--I was indignant about that, let me tell you.)

So we have plans to level the yard and re-establish the lawn (which the dogs didn't dig up to begin with, but that's a long story involving a sewer line, a nine-foot deep trench, a giant hole-fort dug by neighborhood boys, a cornfield, an above-ground pool and a lot of bark chips.) And in the meantime, I'm enjoying my flowers: