the weather in st louis has been fantastic this spring.  which is unforutnate when you are spending every weekend working on a kitchen renovation.

several weeks ago we were able to take a kitchen break and spend some time outside.  we decided to do a little work on the yard.  we bought some flowers for the pots that i have on the deck.  we also planted a small plum tree at the end of our yard, near our garage.  a few days later, i went outside and noticed that something had eaten the marigolds out of the pots.  we tracked it back to this guy:



in his defense, the marigolds did look kind of like tennis balls, which are his favorite outside toy. we watched him when he was outside playing for the next couple of days and worked on "leave it" and thought we were good to go with new plantings.

so imagine my surprise a few days later when i looked outside in the morning and noticed some tree branches in our backyard.  branches with dark purple leaves...  from the new plum tree.  murphy had pulled all of the bottom branches off of the tree!  while the tree didn't look very good, we thought that it would survive.  again we worked with murphy on "leave it" and tried not to leave him outside for very long.  this has been difficult, because with our kitchen work we tend to leave the dogs in the yard for long periods of time so they are out of the way and safe.  we keep an eye on them, but we aren't constantly watching them.

early last week we left him outside for maybe 5 mins while making dinner.  and sure enough, when i let the dogs back in the house, i looked outside and only saw a short trunk sticking out of the ground where our tree had been planted.  the weird part is that he just ate right through the trunk.  he's part dog, part beaver?  we dug up the remaining piece of trunk, and left the hole in the ground while we decided what to do next.

meanwhile, we discover that murphy's been eating all sorts of things in the backyard.  he's been eating the rose bushes (ouch!), the vines that grow along the fence, and some weeds.  although maybe helping with the weeds isn't such a bad thing...  he's very sneaky about his plant eating.  i don't trust him outside anymore, but we've been working on the plant issue and he's gotten a little better about leaving the plants alone.

except then he discovered the hole.  when we removed the eaten tree, we were left with a 2' diameter hole.  murph thought it was great fun to put the entire front half of his body into the hole.  we decided to try to plant another tree.

we were unable to find another plum tree.  we also started wondering if a fruit tree that has fruit with pits would be something that we should plant in a yard with dogs.  so instead we thought we'd try a small crabapple tree.  we were also limited on space between the fence and the garage, and thought that the miniture size (max size of 10'-15') might actually fit better when grown.



we planted the new tree and added a small fence.  i hope this works.  i was laughing in the fencing area at lowes, everyone else there was complaining about deer or rabbits, and we were trying to figure out what size fence we needed to keep our giant puppy off of our tree. our neighbors probably think we're crazy. oh murphy**, it's a good thing you're so cute...

**murphy has been a great puppy, this is really the first time we've had any kind of issue with him. he's normally very well behaved, i really cannot complain too much. when cooper and reese were this age they ate through a wall. twice.