helping in the garden

 Autumn is  my favorite time in the garden, and I think Peppa is also enjoying her first autumn in this world. Here she is helping us install the new wormery tower under one of the apple trees. 

 

Some household members seem to think the new wormery is too colorful, but I love it. Here's hoping the worms enjoy coming and going through the holes under the soil. I was thinking of using it to process pet poo, but after a little research I decided to go with my reservations, as it's in an area where we grow food. I still think the only thing we can do with Peppa's poo at this stage is put it in bags and drop it in the rubbish bin.

One site I looked at suggested putting it in the household toilet and flushing it like human waste. I'm not sure about that either. On the other hand, it would save on plastic bags going to landfill.

on the special diet again, sigh...

Penny had been well for the last couple of weeks, after her hospital visit for gastroenteritis, and I had even reintroduced some aspects of her normal diet.

But... last Friday she was to go to the vet to be sedated so he could look down her throat to check out her strange puffy breathing. He says he can hear 'congestion'.

So, no food after 10 pm. But in the morning she was desperate to go outside to eat grass. I took her on a street walk, but she was searching for grass. What could I do? She obviously felt ill, and there was no point in letting her be sedated if she was unwell. So out to the back yard to act like a sheep and mow the long grass.

My garden always has at least one patch of yummy grass, just in case!

She pooed out the strangest thing. (Apologies if you hate the next two photos, but I always look around on the Net when I'm worried about Penny, so I thought these photos might help someone else to understand their own dog.)

Wow! That sure didn't look good. And then she threw up white froth. (You can see some still hanging from her mouth.)

Off to the vet to explain that we didn't want the sedation and to ask for help. He gave her three injections:
anti-nausea (cerenia);
anti-inflammatory - just a little, I think- (dexadreson);
penicillin (benacillin) -in case there's an infection.

She's been good ever since, except for the worrying coughing/sneezing, which is on the back burner until she recovers from this set-back. But we're back to eating the Royal Canin Gastro Intestinal Low Fat diet. In looking for the link to add here, I notice the advice that this is a diet for management of a condition, not necessarily a long-term feeding product. (I must ask the vet about that.) It says to monitor your dog's weight. Penny has been losing weight over the last six weeks of illness, so I'll keep an eye on that.

But at least, as far as I know, it's a diet that gives her everything she needs in terms of nutrition. We're also finishing off the boiled rice and boiled chicken that I cooked up.

wombat, dog and no rain in sight

When is it going to rain? Our garden is desiccated, and so are the parks where we walk. Here's the soil last week at Yarra Bend.

 

 For the first time in weeks, we decided to take a stroll in Darebin Parklands a couple of days ago, and it sure is dry. The ground is cracking open.


 

The ranger does a terrific job looking after this huge area, and it's great to see the historic mulberry trees are surviving so far.


 

We received an email on Sunday evening warning us to be aware of the wombat that has been released in the Parklands. We'll certainly respect its right to live safely, and won't knowingly disturb it.

To be honest, I'd be a bit scared to meet it unexpectedly. When we go to the hills for our holiday, we don't go too near the huge wombat that lives around our house, except that Penny loves to gobble up his poo. I usually leap out of the car first, gather up the heaps of grassy poo and put it in the compost bin, but occasionally I miss some and Penny delights in it. One time, I closed a gate in the daytime not realising the wombat might be in that paddock. I remembered, went down in the dark to re-open the gate and a humongous giant - the wombat - rushed past as soon as it was open. Penny and I took to our heels in fright.

should we compost dog poo?

Browsing Slavenka's blog today, I followed a link to a discussion of the use of human urine in gardens. I was fascinated, because I'm trying to follow the principles of sustainable gardening in my care of our land. (We haven't started using our own wee on the garden yet!)

The discussion mentioned that human urine helps dog poo to break down. Hmm... that got me thinking about the pros and cons of burying dog poo.

I bought a product at a garden centre a few months ago, a powder that supposedly helps dog poo break down into a harmless compost. I forget what the product was called, but I'm fairly sure it's the same as we use in our Bokashi composting system. So I've been digging a hole and shovelling Penny's 'doing' into it - never near any place we grow food.

But I recently read a book called 'Soil Food - 3,764 ways to feed your garden'. It's by Jackie French, and although she provides this huge number of ways to enrich your soil, she draws the line at dog poo, because dogs have lived with us for so long that we share similar diseases.

So now I'm back to putting the poo in plastic bags, to be buried in landfill. As this article at the BBC points out, that means the goodness in the dog faeces will be unavailable for as long as the plastic takes to decompose.

The site has lots of ideas for dealing with this issue. And it confirms something I've always suspected - walking uses certain muscles that stimulate the dog to defecate!