Gardening Part 2 – Barking up the Right Tree

If you’ve read “Gardening Part 1 – Digging my way to Oz” , you’ll remember that I have green paws! I told you all about the work I was doing on the grass area called a lawn and how my bipeds were so impressed they said it was becoming a rabbit warren.

It wasn’t many days after that, when the bipeds started some work of their own in the garden. They moved some plants – I discovered why it had been a failure when I’d moved them. It seems you have to make the new hole for them and pop them in it, plants are totally helpless! Then my bipeds did some digging and moved earth away – they didn’t let me help with any of this. I was surprised to see that the hole was deeper than any that I had dug, but it was a very boring shape. Then they made some sort of edging which was raised up a little. I heard them say it should keep the bark inside the area. That made no sense at all, I can bark louder than a lot of dogs and I was fairly sure that even if I stood inside this area the dogs at the other end of the street would still be able to hear me.

They brought out some big bags that they said contained bark. I was curious to see what barks looked like as I’d only heard them. I soon discovered they were talking about pieces of the rough skin from trees! Apparently bipeds use it in the garden to stop weeds. They put all this bark into the area they’d been digging. The male biped spread it out so that it was quite flat. Just when I thought he was going to fetch his big spirit level to check it, I heard the female say, “That’ll do, it’s flat enough!” I wasn’t particularly impressed with the results of their work, my efforts were always much more artistic.

They then started to do some really strange things. I don’t often see my bipeds down on their hands and knees and, I must say, it is usually quite entertaining when they are. They started scratching at the bark with their hands and saying what fun it was. I was glad that they were having a laugh and I was enjoying watching them playing. I settled myself down comfortably to see what they would do next.

They stopped and had a little chat and then they went and fetched some of my toys and some treats. They started playing with my toys, but I was having so much fun just watching them playing that I didn’t join in. Then they started scattering treats around, so I decided that now they really did need my help! When I had cleared up what they had scattered, one of them started burying treats and then digging them back up. I decided to show them that I could get the treats back up much more efficiently than they could. This made them laugh! They kept burying treats to see how fast I could get to them. We had a wonderful time playing in the bark.

I really liked this bark area and worked on making it a little more artistic every day. If I ever started to dig anywhere else in the garden, one of my bipeds would take me across to my special place with one of my outdoor toys and we’d have a game. Sometimes I’d find a few treats had been left there. The bipeds were always so thrilled when I continued my improvements to this area that I didn’t have time to continue with my work on the rabbit warren in the lawn. This bark area became my special place in the garden – so special that I named it Clowie’s Corner.

I was a little bit sorry to leave it behind when we moved to Spain. I am happy to say that I have since discovered a new place special enough to be named Clowie’s Corner, but I’ll tell you about that another week.

See you next Wednesday!