Physical barriers can protect your flowerbeds from dogs

Q: I have a friend who is having trouble with dogs going to the bathroom in her flowerbeds. She has tried ammonia, mothballs and red pepper. She isn’t having any luck. Do you have any ideas?

A: Well, that depends on the answers to several questions. First, are they her dogs? If they are hers, training them to use another area may be possible. Where else could they go?

Giving them an alternative area will be necessary during the training phase.

Are the dogs just marking territory in a single location, or are they using the whole bed? If they are just marking one spot, an object placed in front of the shrubs could be used by the dogs, and it could protect the plants.

Unfortunately, if they are using the whole bed, and especially if they aren’t her dogs, the best solution is probably a barrier. Fencing, an electric wire or some other physical barrier will work better than deterrents based on smell or taste.

Q: I thought that my irrigation system was supposed to save water, but the water bill came, and I couldn’t believe how many thousands of gallons of water it said we used. I hope it is wrong. How do I go about proving how much water the system uses?

A: The fastest and easiest way to measure the water usage is to use your water meter. Make sure all the other water-using devices are turned off.

Run each irrigation zone in the system one at a time for five minutes, and then note how much water the meter says was used. Next, compare the fiveminute amounts of water to how long the zones actually run. If a zone normally runs for 15 minutes, for instance, then multiply your measured five-minute amount by three. Once you have all the totals, multiply the totals by how many times the zones run each week, and lastly, by how many weeks are in your water company billing cycle.

As you can see, this could add up to a lot of water. If the numbers don’t seem to add up, there might be a leak in the system that is allowing the water to run all the time.

Let me give you a few numbers to mull on: Plants (lawns) evaporate water off their leaf surfaces as the means to move water though out the plant. Water also evaporates out of the soil, especially if the weather is hot or windy.

To keep lawns green and growing as opposed to brown and dormant, we need to add enough water to replace the water lost through plant transpiration and evaporation. In many areas of the country, we are told that this amount is 1 inch of rain or irrigation applied to the lawn during each week-to-10-day period during the hot weather.

If we want to cover an acre (43,560 square feet) with just 1 inch of water, it would require the addition of 27,152 gallons of water. If you have a quarter-acre area, you would use the whole 27,152 gallons after a total of four waterings of ¼ inch each.

Since the weather changes and plant needs change, we might use much more water in the summer and much less water in the winter.

You can measure your yard area by area to see how much land you need to irrigate. Just multiply the length and width of each area and add the totals.

Once you know your total square footage, multiply it by 0.62 gallons to get the total gallons for your landscape.

Imagine when weather reports say a hurricane is going to drop 1 foot of rain on an area. That totals 325,829 gallons of water per acre. That’s almost a million gallons of water for every 3 acres. Since there are 640 acres in a square mile, that comes to over 208 million gallons per square mile.

Some areas were hit by more than one hurricane. It is no wonder landscapes flood during a hurricane.