We spent some of yesterday trying yet another way to stop the dog digging up the seed potatoes - he likes the flavour of the blood and bone we put with them to help them get started.
Our first attempt a couple of weeks ago had been to try and surround the potato patch with a kind of fence but the wind was too strong for the material we were using. Then my older son suggested using a spray of cayenne pepper (ten parts water to one part cayenne pepper) - that kept him (the dog, not my son) away from the patch briefly. My son also suggested putting down newspaper over the patch with some sort of weights to hold the paper down. This kind of worked, except where the dog removed the paper.
Yesterday, while my grandchildren played with my wife's iphone, we tried the approach I'd suggested initially: some netting over the top of the patch that would allow the plants to grow but keep the dog from digging. It looked very successful - we even managed to reuse some very elderly wire netting that was cleared out from under the house where my wife and youngest son had pulled out the laundry floor on Friday in preparation for a new one going down.
After making some pins out of number 8 wire to hold the netting down, we felt that success had finally been achieved. Went inside to rescue the smartphone from the kids. Found later in the afternoon that the dog had chewed some of the netting (it's a material type) and got into the end of the one of the patches and....dug up a potato. Put the remaining bit of elderly wire over the broken material.
Went to my other's son's first son's birthday party (on yet another very hot day) where my son didn't have time to show my wife his newly acquired iphone mark 4 because he was busy running around after a bunch of pre-schoolers, and came home to find yet another potato had resurfaced. Dog duly told off in such terms as to make him look abashed for at least five minutes.
Pinned down the material again. Discovered that the dog has decided to use the area around the clothesline for depositing other things -the kind you walk in by accident and only discover after the smell keeps walking along with you.
Washed the dog who was also carrying around some of the same smell, and finally settled down to watch an excellent Indian movie on Maori television that I'd already seen in which true love doesn't win out, while my wife, who knew the story already, played a game that has so far defeated her, on the app on the phone that is obviously smarter than her...at least for the moment.
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