I Hate My Dogs... Well, not really....

I swear, the breeder we got Maggie from must own stock in Home Depot...  She's chewed up a lot of stuff in the past seven months, but this latest episode takes the cake...

We have a drip irrigation system for our yard, and pop-up sprinklers for the one area intended to be grass (which right now resembles the dust patches where buffalo sleep...).  For some reason, Maggie (now to be known as Demon Dog) has an affinity for the taste of the vinyl tubing that is used in our drip system... 

 

During the winter, most of the drip lines that were exposed when we cleared out our landscaping beds got chewed to pieces.  I replaced most of that back in March, and rearranged the lines so that they were providing enough water to the areas where we wanted things to grow, and not to the areas we wanted to leave as hardscape or for cactus beds.

Within a week or two, most of those lines had been dug up and/or chewed thru, so I replaced them again in early April.

Fast forward to June... Lots of things are growing, so I'm assuming that the drip system is in pretty good shape... Wrong.  Maggie got into them again a few weeks back while I was out of town, and by the time I got back, things were not in good shape...

In one stretch, she had managed to rip out four lines which were going to plants along the wall by our patio.  Normally, not a problem, except that the piping runs under the patio, making it horribly difficult to fix.  To make matters a little worse, the lines had been leaking water under the patio, leaving little to support the flagstones.  Short story:  because it was soaked sand/mud, I was able to gain access to the 1/2" poly tube and replace all the driplines in that section after an hour of digging and a lot of cursing... But the leaks were plugged.  Repacking sand under this entire area is not going to be fun at all, either...

 

She also managed to chew off drips that had been put in place when two of our Queen Palms were first planted ten years ago, and were now firmly embedded thru the root systems... Not only could I not pull out the line on the first one, but the supply tube was also buried inside the root balls.  Doing some digging about 3' away from the tree, I managed to locate the supply line, and then dug a trench towards where I thought the drip fitting was, using water to help clean sand away from the roots.  By now, it was 8:00pm, and hard to see anything without a flashlight, but I did manage to find the fitting and get a new dripline put in place by 8:30.... Not how I'd planned to spend my evening.  Plus I have the other one still to fix tonight...

 

The last part of the dripline damage was the supply tube itself... This is made of 1/2" poly tubing, which is easy to use in areas that require lots of bends and twists, but the downside is that it can also be punctured... The photo to left is one section that she'd uncovered entirely and went to town on as though it were a bone.... so I had to cut two sections out and replace with new piping.  Fortunately, that only took about fifteen minutes to do.

 

All in all... about four hours of work and $35 in parts from Home Depot.  This time.  And I can pretty much guarantee that there will be a next time, unfortunately.....