This past weekend, as I walked through my dog ravaged backyard I remembered a time when my yard was compliment worthy. Really, when we were having window guys stop by for estimates they’d look out the back window and proclaim the beauty of our backyard. But that’s all changed since Annie dog came in the picture.

Yup, she looks cute and cuddly in the picture above, but believe me, there’s a master of destruction lurking behind those sweet puppy dog eyes.

Take the one above for instance, that’s our four legged house guest we had a few weeks ago. Can you see how nice Annie got along with her?  Actually, they got along quite well, this is an action shot of them wrestling. Annie just happened to have her mouth open and aimed at the little dogs head. But the point of this post, was to talk about my yard. And the yearning I have for it to return to it’s former glory.

The picture above doesn’t quite portray it’s former glory, but believe me, it’s better than what I’ve got today.

This pretty pink bush no longer lives. It was a casuality of Annie, much like many other plants in my yard. In fact, no shrub or flower was spared.

But enough mourning over spilled milk and eaten plants. I’m moving on, and I’ve been looking into alternatives to make my yard pretty again. First of all, a temporary dog run might need to be instituted until Annie dog has calmed down enough to realize we don’t want her eating our plants. It’s too bad we can’t train her to pull our weeds as well as she pulls  branches off of my Spanish Broom.

Here are some dog run options I’ve found:

A homemade dog run, I like this option, because we can make it as large as we want. And add shelter to it and maybe plant a little bit of grass in there for her.

Here are a couple of store bought options, these seem a little small for our dog. The first one is the most expensive of the two, but it comes with a nice cover, which is definitely needed. The second, would need a cover added to it, and I fear that Annie dog would jump right over it.

petsmart.com

petsmart.com

It’s something that will need some thought. It’s sort of like deciding whether you want to spank your child or not. OK, maybe not exactly like spanking your child, but I do feel like this would be a punishment. Which is something I certainly don’t want it to be. Maybe Annie will only have supervised time out in the yard.  Well, off to take my destroyer of all things green on her second walk of the day!