Sorry for the hyperbole but I've made the sweestest little accessory for the avid gardener with dogs. I have 2 large german shepherds who are well trained and superbly well behaved with a single exception. To dogs in general the patio/perennial border boundary, call it the 'event horizon', is a nebulous concept at best, more of a non sequitur.
Or in plain english my dogs trample my delphiniums every year. I've always avoided any sort of edging or fence as just too ugly. Until now. I've invented my own solution to this and if I do say so myself it's pretty sharp (see photo, blue arrow points to dog barrier.) It's also dirt cheap, easy for anyone to do and works like a charm! It consists of nothing more than steel rebar (3 foot pieces available at home depot for 99 cents ea) redwood lathe (8 foot pieces at home depot for $ 2.25 ea) and some heavy solid copper wire (Cliff's variety small roll $3.50)
Anyone else have dogs trampling their flowers? This all but disappears. The steel turns brown/red with rust the redwood weathers silver gray and the copper wire will eventually I presume add a touch of green.
on tv
on tv there showed a while ago a nice solution...hehe 'nice'; it was i believe in scotland or some great vaste country where it was too expensive to build fences. each animal (goats) had a collier and in the field they had put a wire, if the goats (or sheep) came across that wire they received an electric shock. it was astonishing to see that they clearly stay like a meter frome the wire, you easily tell because you could see were the grass was eaten and where not.
James, don't they just jump over it?
If they don't, what a good idea!
Also, my dog is a behemoth Great Pyrenee. All the little wooden fences I've tried, she has stepped over or on them, or rolled over against them and knocked them over.
How would your fence work against a great, noble beast with a gross indifference toward boundaries?
Anti-dog height
I experimented with sliding the "fence" up/down the rebar and empirically found my 95lb german shepherds unwilling to cross 18" as a way to get from point A to point B. 18" and theyd rather walk around. I'm sure if a cat was on the other side they would gladly leap over my dog-rail but that's a rare occurrence. This stops 95% of their former casual strolling through the flowers. You can see in the photo the flowers look pretty darn good after 2 months with the rail installed, better than this garden has ever looked.
And eventually they will rust/rot back into the ground. If anyone wants to try I could make a nice construction drawing.
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