A while back I wrote about our new lawn, and how Beanie’s pee is killing it. We didn’t fancy using things like Dog Rocks and Greenum in her water to change the composition of her urine, so we were left with two options:

• Don’t let Beanie pee on the grass – teach her to pee on the gravel-covered bits instead
• Failing that, hose down the favorite pee spots with water regularly. This dilutes the urine, turning it into a powerful fertilizer that can actually help the grass grow.

Well, neither of those methods are working. While other dogs apparently like to pee in one particular place, our Beagle prefers to use a new spot every single time. As a result our lawn looks like it’s been shotgunned by acid pellets – lots of dead holes everywhere!

We’ve tried repairs, but as soon as we clear and seed a dead patch, Beanie becomes very interested in it and starts digging.

Behold the face of guilt (with dead grass spots visible in the background)

We’ve been able to protect one or two spots by putting her old crate over them, but we’re losing the war.

Today we did more research into the problem, and returned from our local DIY store with two purchases that might just help us to get our lawn back.

The first is a type of grass seed that is meant to be resistant to the super-concentrated fertilizer in dog urine.

As you can see from the pack, it’s a mixture of perennial ryegrass and red fescue. I’m guessing that grass grown from this kind of seed doesn’t look quite as nice as the stuff used in typical gardening turf because it’s dirt cheap – about £3 a box. That’s fine by me. I’ll take rough-and-ready living grass over rotting debris any day.

The second thing we got – and we happened on it purely by chance – was this:

It’s a pack of six galvanised metal grids, ordinarily meant to be made into a cubic container for rocks and the like. In this case, we’re just going to lay the grids on the ground to protect fresh repairs from digging paws. I think they’re heavy enough and thin enough to be difficult for Beanie to pick up and play with. At the same time, they don’t have any sharp edges so they should be safe for her. So for £6, we can now protect at least six more lawn repairs.

The other thing we’re going to do is refrain from using any lawn fertilizer stuff. It might be the fact that the lawn was heavily fertilized when it was laid that makes it so vulnerable to Beanie’s pee.

I’ll let you know how it goes…