Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Good fences make good neighbors. The folks that live diagonally across the road from us, their house fronts on Round Lake Blvd., have two dogs. These dogs like to visit our dogs. Note that this means their dogs do not have an enclosure to keep them at home. When the neighbor dogs come calling, our dogs bark and bark and bark and bark. Really annoying. To amplify the annoyance Vega and Rigel (remember them?) have discovered a variety of ways to penetrate the fence and go play with the visitors.
All understandable, especially when you have two strong, determined puppies (8 months old now and 86.6 pounds and 74.6 respectively, Vega and Rigel), but not acceptable because there is a busy highway nearby. It is also always possible that the lure of things far away could grip these two star-named dogs and they could wander. Not good.
What to do? A fence. We now have a chain-link fence that surrounds all our 2.5 acres except for the area immediately around the house. We also have a fence around the orchard since Vega ate the netaphim. We used to have a fence around the vegetable garden, but I dismantled it three years ago. So, we have a lot of fence.
Even so, I have begun installation of one more. This one I will create from old snow fence and a plastic snow fence, using fence posts made from bamboo and old wooden stakes. The purpose of this fence will be to create a 50 foot or so setback from the chain-link fence line. This will separate our dogs from the neighbors by a good distance and should lower the volume and decrease the escape attempts. I hope.
That’s what I spent the morning building. It’s not quite done, since I have to create a gate that can open and close to admit the truck and lawn mower, but I think I have that figured out. I’m not sure whether this will be permanent or not. If it is, then I’ll have to use better looking material, for now, though, I only want to see if it solves or substantially ameliorates the problem.
