The Modern Victory Garden

As many of you are aware, on Sunday I spent several hours working on the annual spring potato planting process.   This is a pretty significant undertaking because I plant a large amount (feeds us for a year) and because I trench the beds to grow the most potatoes possible in my raised boxed beds.  The final step requires setting up the PVC hoops over all of the potato beds and covering them with bird netting.   This is necessary because I use bone meal in the trenches as an organic fertilizer and unfortunately my old dog (who shares the back yard with the garden) likes to dig up all the beds looking for the source of that delicious "bone" smell.   She has done it before, so now I just routinely protect the beds as part of the annual planting process.  

(sigh)

Apparently one portion of the netting was not secured tightly enough and our dog must have searched every stretch of the covering to find this one point of potential entry -  but search she did - and find it she did.   She gets points for persistence but they hardly are enough to make up for the demerits she won for herself today.   

The damage consists of her walking down the center of the bed knocking over the piles of trenched dirt, digging up several potatoes in about three trenches and then tearing some of the netting to get out when she "forgot" how she got in, in the first place!   There is no permanent damage done - and it all can be repaired with a little time and attention, but I am certainly not too happy with the family pooch at the moment.   I did my best to secure the section she managed to get through and hopefully she will give it a rest for another year.   I plan to wait until Saturday to tackle the fix up work as nothing is in any immediate jeopardy and I would prefer to do the repairs during the light of  day.       

Ah well, the spring planting season was going entirely too smoothly this year.   I was due for a hiccup in the plan and if this is all that occurs then I guess I am getting off easy.