6 VEGETABLE GARDENS AND FRUIT ORCHARDS

For some gardeners, food production is where it’s at. Flowers are okay, especially any that keep bad bugs away from the veggie crops, but a tomato plant covered in ripening beefsteaks or a tidy row of salad fixings are what it takes to make their hearts race. Fruit trees provide not only the ultimate crop, but often a very pretty flowering period, at least some shade, and perhaps an interesting branch structure through the winter. Fruit trees frequently come in small, medium, and large (dwarf, semi-dwarf, and standard) varieties, and can be trained in various ways to fit almost any space in your landscape. Fruiting shrubs and vines provide another option.

How do dogs fit into all of this? first, though often referred to as carnivores, they more properly should be classed as omnivores, similar to bears and humans. They have taste buds specifically for fruit sugars, to help determine when fruit is at its sweetest and most nutritious. While some dogs may be reluctant to “eat their vegetables,” others savor fresh peas and carrots and find berries and tomatoes sheer bliss. Be aware of any breed characteristics that would argue against sharing your garden bounty with your dog. For example, Bichon Frise have a high incidence of calcium oxalate stones in their urinary tracts, and many vegetables can cause problems for them.

Second, dogs can be helpful in keeping other furry feeders out of the garden or orchard. No, I don’t mean that they actually guard the garden day and night. Though you could try that, you would probably find that a dog in hot pursuit of a rabbit might cause more damage than the rabbit alone. Dogs left outdoors at night might also develop an annoying barking habit. But the mere daily presence of a dog in the landscape leaves odors that can convince deer and rabbits to go elsewhere, especially if there are other tasty gardens nearby that don’t have a resident canine. Some gardeners go so far as to tie bundles of dog hair around the garden, though experience has shown that the effectiveness of dog scent as a repellant depends on how hungry the foraging critters are and how much food is available elsewhere. Finally, protective fencing you might install to keep the dog out can also serve as a barrier to bunnies and other eager munchers.

Research is ongoing, but fresh greens, veggies, and fruits may provide the same sort of trace minerals and other micronutrients to dogs that they do to humans, enhancing health and well-being. So offer to share your crops.

Planning Your Produce

Once again, you get to plan before you plant. How much space have you set aside for a vegetable garden in your overall site plan? Have you included an orchard, or will you use fruit trees and vines as part of your landscape? Keep in mind that a vegetable garden needs six to eight hours of full sun a day, and that it doesn’t have to be huge to be productive. For example, two raised beds four feet wide and ten feet long with a path two feet wide would need a 10 x 10 patch of ground and can provide you with 75 to 100 pounds of vegetable crop. A 20 x 20 space gives you room for crops requiring more space than most, such as sweet corn or winter squash.

This fence has successfully been keeping hungry deer out of the fruits and veggies.

Take the dimensions of whatever area you’ve set aside and plot them to scale on your graph paper, using as generous a scale as you can ft. We’re going to recommend you garden in raised beds, both because they’re an efficient way to raise crops and because they provide a definite visual reminder to dogs not to trespass. You can easily staple or nail stakes and wire fencing to wooden bed borders if you need a slightly more definitive barrier.

Beds should be narrow enough for you to reach the middle easily. You should be able to do all planting, maintenance and harvesting without stepping in the beds. Four feet seems to be manageable by nearly everyone but young children. Paths between beds are permanent, and could be grass, packed gravel (you want to be able to push a wheelbarrow on them), or mulch. They should be wide enough to fit a garden cart or wheelbarrow easily, which will also mean they’re wide enough for your dog to lie close to you while you garden. Two feet is often given as a guidelines, but that may be a bit narrow for a garden cart. Mark out boundaries and see how they work for you before actually installing the beds and paths.

Your potential crops are limited only by your climate zone, space, and imagination.

When graphing out your garden, do not follow the spacing requirements you’ll find on many seed packets. The space advised between rows has more to do with commercial farming and the need to move equipment through fields than it does with the home garden. Instead, use the suggested spacing between plants (or even slightly less) in all directions. Raised beds, if properly maintained, can support intensive cultivation. A garden filled with plants whose leaves overlap just slightly is less prone to weeds and to drying out between watering.

A garden ready to grow, fenced off from unwanted visits.

Start making lists of crops you’d like to grow. Consider your family’s (and that includes the dog) likes and dislikes. There’s no point in growing broccoli if no one will eat it. You probably know the likes and dislikes of the human members of your family, but what about the dog? Well, canines are every bit as much individuals as humans, so generalities will not cover them all, but many dogs appreciate fresh peas, crave carrots, and munch down tomatoes (usually after first playing with the red “balls”). One dog owner reports he planted a section of pea vines just for the dogs. At first, he let them harvest their own, but they weren’t very gentle about it, so to save the vines, he does the picking. My Kees-hond Sundance was a berry aficionado, and would harvest the bottom section while I picked the top. For those of you in the south, where they can be grown, peanuts would be a big hit with the majority of canines. For some unknown reason, kiwi roots seem to be a doggy attractant, and you may find you have trouble with your dogs digging up your plants.

Offer your dog a bite of whatever fruits and vegetables you’re eating to learn her likes and dislikes. Just stay away from onions and garlic in anything more than a small quantity (the disulfides they contain can, in sufficient amounts, create a blood disorder in dogs and cats) and be somewhat cautious with grapes because recent veterinary reports have found raisins in large quantities to be toxic. Spinach, beets, and rhubarb contain high levels of glycosides and oxalates and can prove irritating to the canine gastrointestinal system. Sulfur-containing veggies, such as Brussels sprouts and beans, can cause flatulence. Plant parts that are toxic to humans, such as rhubarb leaves and the leafy parts of potato plants, are also harmful to dogs. Dogs may also be inclined to eat the seeds or pits of fruits such as cherries, plums, apricots, apples, and peaches, which all contain cyanide and can cause seizures if ingested in large amounts.

Melons prove popular with many dogs, with watermelon a top choice of many. This is “Angel.”

With the current popularity of raw diets for dogs, many dog owners grind up fresh vegetables and fruits as part of their dog’s daily ration. By growing these items yourself, you can be assured that they’re fresh and chemical-free. Please do investigate the advisability of anything you choose to feed, especially in large quantities, by consulting a book on canine nutrition, or at least by feeding smaller quantities at fist to learn how well your dog tolerates the food. Not only can some garden produce cause digestive upsets or worse, some simply cannot be broken down by the canine digestive tract, and so provide no nutritive value. Formulating a canine diet is not simply a matter of throwing a list of ingredients together willy-nilly. It’s fine to want to provide a healthful home-made diet for your dog, but do some serious research to learn if it is indeed healthful—don’t just rely on one book, however popular it may be.

Raising Your Beds

Some people simply dig down paths and mound up soil between them to make unenclosed raised beds, but I advise you use actual framing because it provides an easily recognizable boundary for the dog. If the dog should happen to dash through the bed, at least the whole thing won’t come cascading down into the paths.

Cedar trunks are readily available in the Northwest, and make a durable border for raised beds.

The carpentry involved in building a frame for a raised bed can be as minimal as you want it. You can even find ready-made corner hinges, made so you simply slot 2 by 6’s or 2 by 12’s into them and pound stakes into the ground, and voila, completed framing. At www.spacesavergardening.com, you can find the VegHerb™ corner joints system for framing raised beds. Their angles are adjustable, so you can build not just rectangles, but triangles, stars, or almost any geometric figure based on straight lines. They are also stackable, so you can make your beds as deep as you desire. Any home improvement center will have metal right-angle brackets that you screw to your boards. Or, if you are handier with wood and screws, you can make any combination of corner blocks/stakes, mitered corners, or whatever suits your fancy.

You can construct your raised bed borders out of treated wood, faux wood such as Trex, even such non-wood alternatives as rocks, bricks, cottage stone, and cinder blocks. Don’t use creosote-soaked railroad ties because they can poison your plants, and avoid lumber that has been treated with CCA, chromated copper arsenate, which may leach into the soil.

Plot your beds out on your graph paper. Remember not to make them too wide—you don’t want to have to walk in them to reach the middle. Mark your beds out on the ground and check the sun exposure throughout the day. Most vegetables appreciate all the sun they can get (though in very hot areas, afternoon filtered shade may help prevent wilting). Note how the beds lie in your landscape—running north-south, east-west, or something in between—so you can plan your plantings to avoid having tall plants shade shorter ones (unless you want them to, of course). Let the dog in the yard with you and watch to see if you have placed your beds across an important path. If so, maybe you can just turn your plans 90 degrees so the dog has a path to run along rather than a vegetable bed to plow through.

One fence serves multiple purposes, with beans planted on one side and berries on the other.

Once you are settled on where your beds and paths will go, hand dig or till the top six inches of dirt in your beds. Add a few inches of weed-free topsoil, then an inch of compost, and whatever soil amendments you may need. Use a pitchfork to mix these layers. Repeat the process until you have filled your beds to a depth of eight to twelve inches. Water well, and you’re ready to plant.

Planting Your Crops

Consult your list of vegetables and herbs you’d like to grow. Have a stack of copies of your graphed garden space. Start laying out your crops. Take your time with this because you have many things to consider—space needed by various plants, time needed to harvest, dates of first and last frost in your area, plant height, yield in harvest per plant, inter planting and succession planting. Of course most crops have a substantial difference in the size and time to harvest among their many varieties. Again, vegetable gardening is a whole book-length subject in itself, and you can consult any of the large choice available for specific info on planting and raising produce. Here, we’ll just remind you of a basic or two, and how some vegetables relate to dogs.

Everyone is eager for the harvest.

Start small. You don’t want to be overwhelmed with garden maintenance chores, nor with produce. Those stories of desperate gardeners leaving zucchini on neighbors’ doorsteps under cover of darkness are true!

Include herbs in your plans. They not only look good in the garden, they taste great in cooking, and they attract insect pollinators to the garden. Many dogs savor fresh herbs in their food. If you decide on any unusual herbs, check for any medicinal properties they may have before feeding them to your dog.

Some canines are real fruit and vegetable afcionados.

If you’re the type of gardener who thrives on instant rewards, buy plants for transplant rather than starting from seed. Yes, it costs a bit more and you probably won’t find the variety that you may find with seeds, but you have an immediately visible garden. You can mulch around plants without having to worry about seeds being able to break through. You can also put up cages around individual plants if you need a stronger defense against your dog (but consult Chapter 9 for some training that will lessen your problems). You can protect small row crops grown from seed, such as carrots, by bending a length of window screen in half to form a tent over a row. By blocking the ends with additional pieces of wire or scraps or wood, you can even keep out rabbits.

Let’s take a brief look at a few veggies and how they relate to dogs.

Some vegetables to recommend are peas, enjoyed by many canine munchers raw or cooked, and carrots, often advised as a way to bulk up low-calorie meals for dogs trying to lose weight. Sweet corn is as much relished by dogs as by humans, and just as poorly digested. Dogs with touchy digestive systems may suffer diarrhea after indulging in some corn. Ball-crazy dogs may indeed see tomatoes as objects for play, fetching them until they suffer from wear. At that point, some will eat them and some will leave them where they lie (apples often receive the same treatment, but hold up longer). Squash and radishes don’t often find favor with dogs, and the strong-tasting brassicas (cabbage, Brussels sprouts, etc.) are about as widely popular with dogs as they are with young humans.

Melons, particularly watermelons, are enjoyed by many. I strongly advise offering them to dogs outdoors, or at least in an easily mopped-up room such as the kitchen, because dogs don’t eat them very neatly. I hold a slice of melon by the rind and let my dog eat away the flesh (and seeds). You could also cut the melon off the rind and just give the edible part to the dog.

A somewhat unusual medicinal herb called valerian seems to be a canine counterpart to catnip, at least for some dogs (just as catnip only affects some cats). Don’t plant it in the midst of your garden, because it’s the roots that are savored, and dogs will be enticed to dig them up and roll and rub on them—not behavior conducive to a well-maintained garden.

Onions, garlic, and chives all can present problems for dogs if consumed in significant quantities, disrupting red blood cells. Onions are a definite no-no but oddly enough, garlic is often touted as a supplement for dogs for a wide variety of problems including infections and fleas. There is disagreement among experts about the safe and effective use of garlic so it is best to consult your vet if you have any questions. Don’t share these crops with your dog except perhaps as minor ingredients in stew.

Tomatoes, eggplant, green peppers, and potatoes all belong to the Solanaceae family of vegetables, and all hold the neurotoxins atropine or scopalomine in their leafy parts. It’s extremely uncommon for dogs to munch on these leaves, though puppies may taste nearly anything. What might prove to be a problem is potatoes improperly left in the sun—they synthesize solanin in these conditions, and can be toxic to pets and humans. The leafy part of rhubarb is also poisonous, but also largely ignored by dogs.

Not strictly a vegetable, but many dogs who nibble on grasses enjoy a clump of fescue to call their own.

Cold Frames

These apply to flower growers as well, of course, but many gardeners interested in food crops use them to extend their growing season to harvest fruits and vegetables that otherwise would lack enough warm days to produce. Cold frames can be easily built by even the most inexperienced of carpenters. If you use old windows (often available at garage sales or renovation outlets), you don’t even have to frame the glass, just build the box to fit the window and hinge them together.

Cold frames don’t require much in the way of woodworking skills.

Planting in cold frames is undemanding.

Nearly all cold frames are built on a slant to better collect light (see illustration). They are all low to the ground, and that presents a potential hazard to dogs. A fast-moving dog has more than once landed on top of the cold frame, which didn’t hold the weight well, with the dog ending up in the veterinary office to be stitched up. So when deciding where to place your cold frame, by all means consider sun exposure, but also try to locate it well out of the path of running dogs. You don’t want your desire for muskmelon to end up with your dog at the animal emergency room, after all.

A less-common but still real hazard comes when cold frames are propped open to avoid becoming too hot. Some people just raise the lid and hold it up with a length of wood, but curious dogs sticking their heads into the cold frame have been known to knock the wood aside and bring the lid crashing down on them. Be sure your prop is frmly connected to both the frame and the lid and can’t be so easily dislodged.

Don’t use any fertilizers that might attract the dog to investigate the cold frame (more about this and other fertilizer considerations in Chapter 8).

Pesticides and Fertilizers

I’ll discuss this topic in depth in Chapter 8, but because growing vegetables is an intensive gardening operation and many people seem to feel the need to use these products in food gardening, let’s take a brief look at the subject here.

If you use good soil preparation, crop rotation, cover crops, and compost, you should have little need for fertilizers, whether chemical or organic. Remember that organic products such as fish emulsion, bonemeal, and bloodmeal may be extremely attractive to dogs. Instead of a well-ordered garden you think needs a little extra boost, you may find a garden full of holes and dug-up, rolled-on plants. So use even organic fertilizers with caution. Keep in mind that unless your yard and/or garden are securely fenced, it may not be your dog doing the digging and rolling.

Laurie Fox, Horticulture Assistant at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, warns that chemical fertilizers are salt-based and can burn the paws of pets who walk through them. “Most of these products say they need to be watered in within the first 24-48 hours, so make sure that’s done. If you’re trying to do it before a rainstorm, and the rain doesn’t come, then make sure you get the irrigation system going. It needs the water to be activated, but also you want it in the soil and out of the way of your pet.”

Pesticides present a higher toxic potential. Realize that no garden—and certainly no garden whose crops you plan to eat—could or should be insect-free. Instead, what you want are beneficial insects to control the pesky plant-chomping insects. Plant flowers such as Queen Anne’s lace or yarrow, which offer food for a variety of beneficials. You can even buy batches of ladybugs, green lace-wings, and the tiny Trichagramma wasp to release in late spring. Yes, they’re free to fly away, but if you furnish a friendly environment, they’re more likely to stay.

These Papaya Pear squash are certainly less commonplace than good old zucchini.

You can also use plants themselves to confound pest insects by a practice called “companion gardening.” Any aromatic plants help to mask the attractant odor of the food plant. Crow Miller in Let’s Get Growing (Rodale) notes that basil helps to protect tomatoes, sage and mint assist with brassicas, and savory protects beans. Nasturtiums are good with vine crops (or fruit trees) and for repelling aphids. The old standby marigolds, as well as the less well-known feverfew, repel bugs in general.

The Orchard

You don’t really have to plant in a formal orchard, of course. Fruit trees are useful and ornamental in the landscape simply as trees. Their luscious crops provide a bonus. Bush crops and vines can also be planned to fit anywhere in your landscaping plans.

Keep in mind that fruits need sun every bit as much as the vegetable garden. Even if fruits manage to produce a crop in semi-shaded locations, they won’t be as sweet as those grown in full sun. When planning your space, remember that many fruits require two varieties for proper pollination. Check to see that the varieties you choose bloom at the same time. But also remember all the ways you can include them in your landscaping. Blueberries and dwarf fruit trees can be grown in containers. Orange trees and the like can even be brought inside for the winter if you don’t live in the south but want citrus. Berries of all sorts can be trained into hedges. Trees can be espaliered to lie fat against a wall or trellis. Grapes can climb up an arbor. You can even grow some varieties of tomatoes or strawberries in window boxes. There’s no reason you and your dog shouldn’t enjoy a long season of luscious home-grown fruit.

A rather weedy orchard, but one that produces bumper crops of cherries and plums.

Plan your fruits so everything doesn’t ripen at once, and you’ll appreciate your crops more.

Berries produce fruit faster, are generally easier to grow, and can take up less space (if you keep them under control) than trees. However, don’t plan on using berry bushes as a barrier against dogs. While their thorny brambles may seem imposing to us, dogs don’t view things the same way. Rosie Lerner, Consumer Horticulture Specialist and Master Gardener State Coordinator at Purdue University, notes “I’ve caught both my Belgian Sheepdog and my young Sheltie harvesting berries from my heavily armed’ black raspberries, and all three of my dogs routinely travel right through the bramble patch to chase bunnies and squirrels.”

Wiring berry vines helps keep them in place, but many are invasive.

Berries can best be controlled by training them on wires (see illustration). Grapes traditionally are similarly trained, but only to the top wire, and with much pruning to shape the vines.

Fruit trees prove attractive to many dogs. Perhaps the wood tastes as good to them as the fruit does to us. For whatever reason, dogs have been known to eat a small fruit tree to the ground. My Springer mix Spirit consumed a lovely semi-dwarf plum tree while I was away at work one day. Only about a foot of trunk remained. A barrier fence not only protects the tree from the dog, but from lawnmowers, trimmers, and other yard care machinery.

Newly planted trees should be staked to help their roots take hold, and you can use the stakes as posts for some chicken wire. Circle the stakes and the tree, fasten the wire to the posts, and secure the ends together. This will not keep out a determined dog. For that, you need stockyard fencing and the metal posts you drive into the ground.

Most books advise that you prune fruit trees for three reasons: to maintain a healthy tree by cutting out dead, damaged, or crossed branches; to encourage the desired shape; and to balance growth with fruiting wood. With dogs in the picture, there’s a fourth reason: to limb up enough so playing dogs don’t break branches. So if you’re going to be removing several large low branches, wait for another pruning season before doing a lot of shaping and thinning. You can improve your chances of keeping your tree safe by starting with a larger tree.

An enclosure for blueberries, which you can harvest over many weeks.

It’s a good idea to harvest fruits yourself and offer them to the dog as you see ft. As Katy Fraser points out, “Even the most innocuous of fruits can give a dog diarrhea. Apple seeds and apricot pits contain a little cyanide, so they could be a problem in quantity. Mechanical blockage could result from ingesting any kind of large seed. Having worked at a veterinary hospital, I’ve seen dogs manage to jam up their systems even with things one would approve of them eating. No point giving them extra material to work with.”

By planning for crop protection, you can keep out not only the dog, but birds as well. You can buy bird netting in most garden shops and home improvement stores. For crops you only pick once or twice because all the fruit ripens at nearly the same time, you can just toss the netting over the entire tree and gather and secure it around the trunk. I use bird netting to keep birds from flying into the front windows of my house, and small birds do occasionally get caught in it, so I recommend you check it every day.

For crops with a longer season, you may want to build a frame around the plants and cover it with netting. You can fasten one end of the netting to a length of 2 X 4, and use a couple of latches to fasten the 2 X 4 to a corner post, thus giving yourself a door (see illustration). You can even put a bird feeder on one of the posts as compensation for keeping the birds out of your fruit.

Nearly all fruit-bearing plants will provide you with crops for many years, so think carefully when you add them to your landscape and maximize your enjoyment.