Garden Phase 1.2

Okay, I shoulda known. Yeah, all you people out there thinking "the dogs are totally going to dig up that garden....." You were right. They dug up the garden.

Not all of it. Just the lettuce, radishes and spinach. For some reason they left my little sugar snap teepees alone.

So... teachable moment, right? Last weekend I hustled myself to Lowes and bought some rabbit fencing and put up a little doggie gulag around the garden area. I'm sorry to say I had to cut a few feet off of it because I discovered a large slab of buried concrete just a few inches under the surface, and had to downsize from my initial plans. But at least now it's safely enclosed.

I replanted the radishes, the spinach and the lettuce. Yesterday I saw a few timid radish leaves poking up through the soil, and some feathery things that MIGHT be lettuce... though I've never grown lettuce before, so they could just as likely be weeds or bird seed sprouts. No word from the peas yet... they're still mulling it over.

This past Saturday, after just about giving up on them, I spied the first of my crocus in the front lawn. In the fall Grayson and I planted about 150 bulbs: daffodils, tulips and crocus. The tulips and daffodils are poking their heads up, (though nothing is blooming yet because I'm on the south side of the street, so everything is growing in the shade of the house at this time of year). But the crocus were nowhere to be found. Then, just when I was giving them up for lost, here they are, their stubby little flowers pointing hopefully up at the cold gray sky. Hooray! Spring has sprung!

The weekend was gorgeous. I putzed around in the yard ("Putzed" is code for "scooped dog poop"), then sat in the sun and read a book with a glass of ice cold white wine for a bit. Then Grayson and I brought Mambo out to enjoy the sunshine.

He bearded up at first. Imagine seeing the sky after living in a glass box all your life. But then he seemed to calm down, and spent 20 minutes or so sitting on a piece of wood, listening to things. We plan on making him an outdoor enclosure for playtime this summer. We measured him while we were at it, and he is 16 inches long... but only half of that is body. The rest is tail.

Yesterday I had a book club gathering at our house and Grayson was the perfect little host. He helped me set the table, greeting guests and introduced himself, offered insights into why Roxy is a bad dog, even though she seems perfectly sweet when you meet her, and even brought Mambo out and walked around so everyone could meet him and pet him if they wanted to. Mambo's debut was a success, and we look forward to the day toward the end of the school year when we will pack up his gear and present him to Grayson's class at school.